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Three Corners of Earth, Part 2 of 3
History Demands Our Attention

This is the saddest place in Utah. It may even be one of the saddest places in the West. It is called Mountain Meadow. Topographically, it is just that, a mile-high sloping meadow bounded by mountain peaks frosty this morning with new snow and sub-freezing temperatures.

It was in this spot on a morning towards the end of summer in 1857 that a group of Mormons and Indians turned on a band of immigrants headed for California and killed them. It was an act which to this day generates fierce controversy in the state, not to mention heavy emotions. And it is one moment in Utah, defining or not, that we can’t seem to collectively shake.

Led by captains John T. Baker and Alexander Francher, a California-bound wagon train from Arkansas 140 members strong camped near the present day site of Enterprise, towards the end of summer in 1857. Early on Sept. 7, a group of Indians and local Mormon Indian missionaries attacked the circled wagons of the Baker-Fancher party without warning. The wagon party fought off the attackers until a contingent of Mormon territorial militia, acting on orders from local church leaders, joined the attack. The battle lasted for four days and 15 emigrant men were killed either in battle or while attempting to escape. On the afternoon of Sept. 11 Mormon forces persuaded the emigrants, who were low on ammunition, food and water, to surrender in exchange for safe passage back to Cedar City. Segregated into groups of children, women and teens, and adult males the group, under heavy guard, was led out of the encircled wagons and northeast up the valley. Upon a pre-arranged command, with the parties now strung out as much as a mile apart across the valley, the Mormons and Indians turned on the emigrants. Of the original 140, including nine cowhands hired to drive the party’s cattle, only 17 children under the age of seven survived the trick. Twenty years later John D. Lee, a Mormon leader at the massacre, was tried, convicted and executed by firing squad at the site of the massacre. He considered himself a scapegoat. No one else was ever officially held responsible for the crime. The orphans, except for the possible exception of one, were sent back to Arkansas.

Today, the site, which is just off state Route 18 as it winds through the foothills of the Pine Valley Mountains, is heavy with the judgment of history. It is somber, and quiet. On this frigid morning in mid-March 50 cows bellow in the valley, scraping new snow from spring grass, a car passes on the road, sun comes over the mountains. The public memorial is actually on a low bluff overlooking the valley. The short winding trail has several explanatory plaques along it. At the top is a granite memorial listing the names of the dead. Viewing scopes, cold to the touch, direct the eye to the site of the attack, the encampment, the killing.

This is a site, a period in history, that Utah is just coming to grips with. For the longest time there was almost nothing here mentioning the 1857 event. Then came the granite memorial, but even that did not say who did the killing why. Most today agree that, acting on orders from Mormon church leaders in Cedar City, years of fears, madness and political frustrations motivated the event but, as one of the plaques say, ‘the exact causes and circumstances fostering the sad events--still defy clear or simple explanation.’ Some suggest the Mormons simply acted on orders form church leaders. Others say the wagon train antagonized Mormon settlers as they passed through the state, poisoning water and shouting epithets. Some believe a group of the emigrants had been in a contingent called the ‘Missouri Wildcats,’ a group reported to be working with the Illinois mob that killed Mormon church founder Joseph Smith.

Last year, the church came here to restore the crumbling rock cairn that marked the remains of those killed. The cairn sits down in the valley, and when crews working to erect a protective wall around it accidentally dug up some of the graves--which meant anthropologists had to analyze the remains--Utah, again and in a very public format, had to face the act anew.

I tell you this not because I think Mountain Meadow is a great, fun place to visit. It is not really on the way to anywhere, there are no restaurants nearby and the emotions it elicits from its visitors is not exactly the ingredients for a great vacation. But I think being able to place Mountain Meadow in the context of Utah today is an important part of understanding the state and its people. Think of its equivalents in America’s history.

Jud Burkett/The Spectrum Janet Baker Passow watches as her sister, Cheri Baker Walker, places a bible verse from the book of Psalms into a wreath Saturday at the Mountain Meadows Lower Gravesite. Passow and Walker are the great-great-granddaughters of Capt. John T. Baker, one of the leaders of the group of Arkansas immigrants who were killed in the massacre. Colleen Coates, a member of the Mountain Meadows Association, places flowers Saturday on the actual site where the 1857 massacre of immigrants from Arkansas is believed to have taken place. St. George Daily Spectrum Sept 14, 2003 MOUNTAIN MEADOWS -- After treading through lupine, Russian thistle and intermediate wheat grass on a ranch just north of the Mountain Meadows monuments, Terry N. Fancher mused before an unobtrusive igneous rock. Many believe the 120-pound volcanic rock is an old marker for the Mountain Meadows Massacre site, where about 120 Arkansas emigrants en route to California were killed in a five-day siege that ended on Sept. 11, 1857. Bones have been collected from the ranch and then buried in 1999 at the Mountain Meadows Lower Gravesite, said Clive Burgess, who owns the 153-acre ranch. But remains of between 50 and 90 victims, mostly women and children, are still a mystery, said Fancher, a descendant of Capt. Alexander Fancher, who was killed in the massacre. "It's like we are walking over a grave site and it needs to be taken care of somehow," said Fancher, a Quincy, Mass., resident who toured the site with about 50 people from the Mountain Meadows Association. While theories about the Mountain Meadows Massacre are abundant, some descendants from the Arkansas emigrant company said they are frustrated that few records have emerged to heal history's 146-year-old wound. "I always want to know who were on the wagon train, where the massacre took place," Fancher said. While the Titanic crew's reports helped identify the dead in the sea, he said, "this one, they've never found the captain's log." The Mountain Meadows Massacre was first blamed on American Indians, but many historians now believe early settlers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints carried out the murders. One of them, John D. Lee, was executed 20 years later at what now is the Lower Gravesite Memorial. At the association's meeting Friday evening at the Dixie Center, Ronald G. Walker, a Brigham Young University history professor, said he saw no evidence that Prophet Brigham Young sacrificed Lee as a scapegoat. But at Saturday's gathering near the Mountain Meadow monuments, Will Bragley, author of "Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows," argued Young was partly or wholly responsible for the massacre. More people, including descendants from Lee and the Arkansas emigrant family, said they came to the conference for healing and reconciliation. "None of us here today were on either side," said Verne Lee, a great grandson of John D. Lee and co-founder of the association. "(Lee) was a great man and is recognized as a great settler in the West. I think he make a mistake -- he made many mistakes -- in his life, but the greatest was the murder." Fancher, who sits on the association's board, said playing the blaming game doesn't make sense. "You need to get on," he said. "As long as we are doing things in a nonaccusatory manner, there's a lot better chance to finding out unanswered questions there." While the Utah side has been more open about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Fancher said he hoped more people, especially descendants of the LDS militiamen, will provide any journals or records available. Kent Bylund, a St. George member of the association, said some members have complained that the LDS church owns the Mountain Meadows Massacre Lower Grave Site. The church has not only worked with the Arkansas side to set up the monuments but has maintained the site, he said. While the LDS church's support is important, Fancher said the Mountain Meadows Association should handle matters regarding remains of the dead. The association, he added, needs to set up a long-term committee about the gravesite north of Mountain Meadows, where the remains of unknown victims probably were buried in 1859 by Major James H. Carlton when he passed through Mountain. Before about 100 people at Saturday's meeting, Bylund said the association plans to build a road leading to the monuments, set up highway signs and raise money for a paved parking lot. Many in the audience said they enjoyed working with each other. Sharon Chambers, a direct descendant of Robecca Jane Dunlap, one of 17 children who survived the massacre, said she had known several of Lee's descendants well. A convert to the LDS church, Chambers said she doesn't see any conflicts between her faith and her heritage. "I feel very sad for what happened," she said. "I never felt to blame the Mormon church as a whole."

Media get look at Lee papers

Documents were found at Beaver County Courthouse

By Joe Bauman
Deseret News staff writer

      The document looks crisp, with a blue and purple line setting off the left margin of the white legal paper. The dark ink handwriting is clear and firm.
      Belying the fresh look of the paper is the date: September 1876. The heading is Charge of the Court to the Jury. "Gentlemen of the jury," it begins, showing it derives from a period when only men could be jurors.

Documents from John D. Lee's Mountain Meadows Massacre trial are displayed in Salt Lake City. Chuck Wing, Deseret News

      This was one of more than 80 documents relating to the trial of John D. Lee, the Mountain Meadows Massacre figure, discovered recently. They had been stashed away in the Beaver County Courthouse in Beaver.
      Lee was executed in 1877 for the massacre, which took place in southwestern Utah. In the 1857 murders, carried out by members of the Iron County militia and local Indians, about 120 emigrants were killed. Although nine people were indicted, only Lee was convicted. He was executed in 1877 at the massacre site.
      The documents turned up a month ago in a vault at the courthouse when two members of the Historian's Office of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints went to Beaver looking for information that could be used in a book they were researching, said Bob Woodward, acting director of the Utah Division of State Archives.
      The researchers contacted an archivist at Southern Utah University, Cedar City, about the trove. She called state archivists in Salt Lake City, and Woodward sent two division employees to Beaver to see the documents.
      With cooperation of the Beaver County clerk, at the end of last week they brought the records to the state archives, located on the State Capitol campus. There, archivists have been cataloguing them and working on ways to ensure their preservation.
      Eventually, all the papers will be photocopied and some will be placed on the archivists' Internet site.
      Meanwhile, the Division of State Archives placed some of the documents on display for reporters Tuesday. Spread on tables in the archive building, they were the focus of TV and newspaper cameras.
      Some of the papers are not in such pristine condition. Woodward described one as falling apart. "We have to be awfully, awfully careful with these," he said.
      In fact, archivists were so careful that they issued pencils to reporters. They were worried that journalists' pens somehow might mark the papers.
      Unfortunately for historians, little in the documents is new, although Woodward hopes some unknown tidbit about the past will surface. They apparently are the Beaver court's copy of records from Lee's federal trial.
      When the judge from that trial returned to his home state of California, "he packed up all the records and took them with him," Woodward said.
      These later were turned over to the H.E. Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. Historians have consulted them in detail. Among the historians was Juanita Brooks, a Utahn who wrote the definitive book about the massacre, "Mountain Meadows Massacre," published in 1950.
      Arlene Schmuland of the state archivists office said she has skimmed through the documents. Information contained in them "has actually been published in Brooks' book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre," she said.
      "I don't believe anything in this is surprising."
      Richard E. Turley Jr., managing director of the LDS Family and Church History Department, said that even if they do not provide new information, they do help historians understand the massacre better.
      "These materials are not extraordinarily significant, but they represent pieces in a puzzle that will give us the very best view of the Mountain Meadows Massacre that we've ever had," Turley said.
      The only material in the group that appears new is 1896 correspondence from the family of one of those indicted, militia member John M. Higby. The family was seeking to have the indictment against Higby dismissed.
      Because it was a separate action, that correspondence was not part of the main set of trial documents that the judge took to California.
      The papers' dates range from 1874 to 1896.
      They include copies of grand jury subpoenas, the indictment from 1874, Lee's plea, depositions by church leaders George A. Smith and Brigham Young, the bond posted by defendant William H. Dame, a letter from Lee to Young, a letter from Young to the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, jury instructions, the judgment and sentence, an order setting the date of execution and a return on the order of execution.
      Woodward said archivists are excited by the find. "We think there's more," he said. "There may be more caches of material."
      Containing new information or not, Woodward said the documents were exciting for him and his staff. "To find old stuff, highly significant stuff . . . I think is an archivist's life, this is what you're looking for."

Mtn. Meadows film debuts at U.

By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret News religion editor

      A new documentary film about the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre had its genesis in attempts to heal emotional wounds held over from the 19th century tragedy.
      The film debuts tonight at the University of Utah.
      In a world where yesterday's conflict is used as an excuse for today's inhumanity, Brian Patrick found solace in the fact that descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators of Utah's most infamous murders came together for healing in 1998.
      That's when Patrick of the University of Utah film studies department decided to document not only a metaphor for healing the world's pervasive religious and political conflicts, but the tragedy itself. His object was to "get people talking. It's silence that lets the conflict continue," he said.
      He realizes that in Utah, where nearly 70 percent of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, talk of the killings that historians say were perpetrated by LDS members is an explosive topic. And he knows some will assume because he's even broached the subject, he must have "Mormon-bashing" among his motives.
     Yet Patrick maintains that healing and openness about a subject many have considered taboo are his motivators. The 1857 massacre of some 120 Arkansas immigrants in southern Utah by LDS settlers there has often been called the darkest moment in the state's history, particularly considering the fact that Latter-day Saints had themselves immigrated west to escape mob violence.
      The stigma of the murders left a cloud over descendants of John D. Lee, a Latter-day Saint and the only man ever convicted and executed for the crimes. At one point in the film, at a reunion for Lee's descendants, a woman describes "what it used to be like, how they were outcasts and their children were not allowed to go to school."
      Yet they were able to come together with descendants of the Arkansas Fancher party to form the Mountain Meadows Association "in a spirit of friendship and forgiveness," Patrick said.
      "To me that's such an unusual thing in today's world, where you have all these warring camps and factions that keep this endless cycle of vengeance and hate going on. This is different in that it has sort of a positive outcome, and that's such a hard thing for people to do."
      The film examines how difficult it has been for descendants of the victims to give up their traditional oral history and stories and come together with Lee's descendants. He credits efforts by President Gordon B. Hinckley of the LDS Church in 1999 to get people together and help rebuild the monument to the victims.
      To Patrick, watching southern Utah residents working together to rebuild the memorial was "almost like they were atoning for what their ancestors or friends of their ancestors had done."
      He credits the church for its willingness to cooperate in his efforts. "I had total cooperation from the church in this. I didn't go out asking to look at secret church records because I'm not writing a book like that. But they really were quite helpful and . . . took the attitude that we know you're making the film, it's OK and let's get it out in the open. We're going to cooperate."
      LDS historian Glen Leonard helped advise Patrick, and the church provided footage of the Mountain Meadows monument dedication, which appears in the film. Gene Sessions of Weber State University and historian Will Bagley also contributed their expertise.
      Though President Hinckley declined to be interviewed for the film, Patrick said his efforts to "break this cycle of silence and hostility or paranoia really opened it up tremendously. I think it was a wonderful thing."
      Though the parts of the film that recreate the massacre are painful by any standard, Patrick believes "if you can show people to other people you can reduce the prejudice in this world, and in this case, I hope to help heal some of those prejudices."
      "Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre," will debut tonight (Feb. 21) and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the new Utah Museum of Fine Arts Auditorium at the U. Tickets are $10. Call 585-6961.
     

Plate is dated as pre-1861

But the writing by 'Lee' may still be forgery

By Joe Bauman
Deseret News staff writer

      A researcher commissioned by the National Park Service says a controversial lead plate purporting to be inscribed by John D. Lee — and supposedly implicating Brigham Young in the Mountain Meadows Massacre — dates from before the Civil War.

Note on lead plate, purportedly was written by John D. Lee and implicated Brigham Young in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Joe Bauman, Deseret News

      But that doesn't mean the writing on the sheet of lead dates to the same period, said Thomas A. Brunty of Arizona State University, Tempe. A forger could have used an authentic old plate to inscribe the message.
      Earlier, William J. Flynn, president of Affiliated Forensic Laboratory, Phoenix, debunked the document as a fake that was not in Lee's handwriting. A documents examiner, Flynn said the note was a "Hoffmannesque" forgery, referring to infamous Utah forger and murderer Mark Hoffman, who is known to have used authentic old paper in making his forgeries.
      John D. Lee was executed in 1877 for his role in the massacre, which happened in extreme southwestern Utah in 1857 and claimed the lives of 120 immigrants from Arkansas. Local Indians and Iron County militiamen carried out the attack on the wagon train, and all the immigrants were killed except 18 young children.
      Records show Brigham Young was informed of the attack after it had begun, and that he sent word not to harm the immigrants. But the trip from and to southwestern Utah took so long that the massacre was over before the messenger arrived back at the site.
      No evidence ever surfaced to implicate Young or high officials of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City — other than the questionable lead note. Written in capitals, the document says the massacre was "ON ORDERS FROM PRES YOUNG."
      The document was discovered in January 2002, when a National Park Service volunteer was cleaning Lee's Fort at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., 15 miles down the Colorado River from Glen Canyon Dam. The note was atop 2 inches of animal droppings and an inch of sand that had accumulated inside the fort; about half an inch of droppings were on top of it.
      Supposedly signed by Lee, it is dated 1872. The fort was built in 1874.
      In a telephone interview, Brunty said the National Park Service asked him to head a team investigate the metal in an attempt to determine its origin. When isotopic measurements were carried out at Arizona State and the Washington State universities and compared with a database maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, the lead was identified as coming from a particular ore deposit in the Southeastern Missouri Mining District.
      "Prior to 1860 this was a source of primary lead production in the region," he said. Later, other lead deposits were more commonly mined.
      The lead sheet was covered with oxidation, and the inscriptions themselves were oxidized.
      "There was heavy oxidation over the inscribed area of the plate," he said. This material, which can accumulate over time, was a yellowish-orange color.
      Asked if the oxidation indicates the plate was inscribed long ago, Brunty replied, "If you're checking for a hoax, the oxidation layer gives you no help, because oxides can be accelerated."
      How could a forger do that? "You can treat it with various acids," he said. "There are a variety of chemical treatments you can use to produce oxide levels."
      The likelihood is remote that someone pulled a lead sheet at random from a building constructed before 1920, he believes. A forger would have had to be more careful about selecting lead from the right period.
      "They would have to synthetically accrue an oxide layer on the substrate," Brunty added. "And I'm not saying any of that's impossible."
      If the note was a hoax, he believes it was carefully done.

The note was discovered in January 2002 in Lee's Fort, south of Glen Canyon Dam. Joe Bauman, Deseret News

      Asked if he has an opinion about whether the note is forged, Brunty replied, "No, I don't."
      The National Park Service is involved because Lee's Ferry is within Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, operated by the Park Service. It commissioned the study last summer, June through August, Brunty said, and he presented the Park Service with preliminary findings in late February.
      Brunty is a graduate researcher in religious studies at Arizona State University, carrying out historical and archaeological research. His previous work included a study concerning the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people in ancient times.

Krakauer's book creates LDS flap

By Dennis Lythgoe
Deseret Morning News

      Something unusual happened after I had finished writing my review of Jon Krakauer's book "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith." I received a lengthy e-mail from the LDS Church Media Relations Department containing a long "review" of Krakauer's book by Richard Turley, managing director of the LDS Family and Church History Department.
      An official written reaction from the LDS Church to a publication criticizing the church may be a first.
      Turley has written a laundry list of what he considers historical errors on Krakauer's part, involving Joseph Smith, the Nauvoo period, the persecution of early Mormons, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Mark Hofmann forgeries. Turley believes that Krakauer's book "may appeal to gullible persons," but he suggests "serious readers who want to understand Latter-day Saints and their history need not waste their time on it."
      Turley says Krakauer provides "no scientific methodology for measuring extremism," asserting that "It seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits." And he concludes that "Krakauer does violence to Mormon history in order to tell his story of violent faith."
      Evidently, Turley sent his opinions to a number of different news organizations around the country, because shortly after receiving this e-mail, an indignant reply from Krakauer himself arrived via e-mail. Krakauer writes that he is "saddened" that Turley, "a high-ranking church official" who speaks "for the LDS leadership . . . elected to regard my book in such a reductionist light."

Massacre site draws descendants

Group reflects on 1857 tragedy in southern Utah

By Nancy Perkins
Deseret Morning News

      MOUNTAIN MEADOWS, Washington County — Descendants of the victims and perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre met on sacred ground Saturday, hoping to heal wounds, open hearts and work toward a common future.
      Perhaps this whole valley should be considered a sacred site, Kent Bylund, a past member of the Mountain Meadows Association board of directors, told a gathering of descendants, friends and others interested in the historic ground located just off U-18 between Central and Enterprise.
      The 1857 massacre of some 120 Arkansas immigrants by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains a volatile topic, constantly fueled by new books, films and other stories. Barely 17 young children were spared in the killings that left bodies of men, women and children scattered in the grassy meadow.
      The only man convicted for his part in the massacre was John D. Lee, a Latter-day Saint whose descendants still live in southern Utah. After his second trial, Lee was taken back to the massacre site and executed by firing squad as he sat blindfolded on a coffin.
    Brigham Young University history professor Ronald G. Walker spoke Friday at the annual meeting of the association in the Dixie Center. Lee's part in the massacre and his bitterness toward then-LDS Church President Brigham Young for his failure to publicly support him are well known. Perhaps less known, said Walker, is why Lee was taken back to the scene of the crime for his execution.
      "It was an extraordinary decision. Perhaps part of the reason for selection of the site was for its moral example, that crime and punishment might go together," said Walker, one of three church historians working on a book about the massacre. "I don't know if you can come to a reconciliation or catharsis of this horrible event in Utah's history without full and honest disclosure. That's what we're trying to do with our book."
      Co-author Glen M. Leonard, director of the Museum of Church History and Art, reviewed various maps drawn of the massacre site, pointing out where the immigrant's wagons were circled, where the defensive fire pits were dug, and the distances victims likely ran before being shot and killed.
      "We know before the immigrants left the corral that 10 of their dead were buried," said Leonard, adding that aerial photos are adding a new dimension of information to the old maps. "Where are the other 90 or more victims?"
      Richard E. Turley, managing director of the LDS Church's Family and Church History Department and a co-author of the book to be published by Oxford University Press, spoke at length about the notion that there were outsiders in the Arkansas train who hated Mormons.
      "The exact makeup of the company isn't known," Turley told descendants of the Baker-Fancher Company who were killed in the massacre, adding there are stories about men in the company who boasted of helping to kill LDS Church prophet Joseph Smith.
      "These ruffians, these outsiders called Missouri Wildcats, could have been part of another company. If they had only pretended to be against the Saints it wouldn't have made any difference," Turley said. "It was the perception of those in southern Utah and people act on perception, not necessarily on what's true."
      Nothing excuses or justifies killing innocent people, said Turley, but the stories do provide information about the climate that existed in southern Utah at the time.
      "Even a few sparks flying in southern Utah could have culminated in disaster for the whole train," he said.
      Mary Tackett traveled from her home in Flagstaff, Ariz., to the annual meeting of the Mountain Meadows Association.
      "You do have to learn about your family's history," said Tackett, whose father, Edward Millam, brought her to the site when she was just 6 years old. "My father was very prejudiced against the Mormons because of it. To me it was never about that, but the base of the story has never changed."
      For more information about the association go to www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com.

                                                              Lee Etching: Truth or a Clever Hoax?
                                                                                                                                                                 BY WILL BAGLEY  

The past is full of surprises. Take the discovery that emerged from the dust January at Lee's Ferry Fort. The Dead Lee Scroll immediately raised the question: Is it a hoax?
   If it is, it will probably be exposed as such. History is tough to forge, for a simple reason: You can't fake the truth. Truth is simple and consistent. Lies and hoaxes aren't.
   Despite Utah TV claims that the lead scroll purportedly containing John D. Lee's dying testament could "rewrite the history of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre,  its contents aren't news.
   The scroll's assertion that Lee slaughtered the Fancher train "on orders from Pres Young thro Geo Smith" is not a new allegation. Anyone claiming such has never read Lee's potboiler memoir, Mormonism Unveiled; or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee.
   Lee's book claimed he "acted by the direct order and command of William H. Dame, and others even higher in authority than Colonel Dame. I have always believed that General George A. Smith was then visiting Southern Utah to prepare the people for the work of exterminating Captain Fancher's train of emigrants, and I now believe that he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of Brigham Young."
   The scroll's accusation wasn't even new when Lee's memoir appeared.
   Newspapers had published charges that Brigham Young ordered the massacre   in Lee's various confessions shortly after he was executed in March 1877.
   Remember, though, Lee was a convicted murderer and Brigham Young is revered as a prophet of God.
   Who are you going to believe?
   We have had a deluge of nonsense from experts. Those who say Lee was a good speller should have looked at his letters and journals before making such a ridiculous claim.
   There are two ways to determine if the scroll is a hoax: historical context and physical evidence.
   Interestingly, there is no way to "prove" it is an authentic artifact. All experts can do is show that the scroll and its contents are consistent with the time and place, but that won't prove it is the real thing.
   If the scroll is a fake, it is likely that the physical evidence will expose it. As for its historical context, the scroll's spelling, syntax and sentiments are vintage John D. Lee.
   The block lettering resembles Lee's inscriptions.
   Lee was "at the Pahreah" in January 1872. His journal doesn't indicate he felt he was dying, but he was suffering from "ague"  --   and untreated malaria certainly left its victims feeling like they were at death's door.
   Lee had been excommunicated from the LDS Church 15 months earlier. He had taken to heart apostolic warnings to "trust no one." If he wanted to leave a final message for future generations, it well might have stressed the theme of his subsequent confessions: "I massacred the Fancher train, but I didn't do it alone or on my own hook."
   The context is so good it is scary. If the scroll is a fake, it is a good one   --  so good that only a few people could have pulled it off.
   Reports indicate the scroll was found above a poured concrete floor. If so, this looks like a hoax. The National Park Service has an excellent record exposing historical fakes.
   Did John D. Lee etch the plate? Did Brigham Young order the massacre ? Until further revelations, we will just have to wonder.
   _________ 
   Utah historian Will Bagley is the author of the forthcoming book, Blood of the Prophets, which he says will focus on a simple and consistent explanation of what happened at Mountain Meadows.

Salt Lake Tribune, November 3, 2000 
 
                         Descendants Demand Artifacts Back
                Return items to grave at Mountain Meadows, group sternly tells state
                                                                                                                            BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH  
A group of descendants of Mountain Meadows Massacre victims has formally demanded the state retrieve items removed from a mass grave and subsequently presented by the LDS Church to an Arkansas museum.
   The artifacts -- a handful of clothing buttons and a wagon wheel nut -- were collected on church-owned land by Brigham Young University archaeologists while gathering the bones of 29 victims of the 1857 slaughter. The grave was uncovered in August 1999 during construction of a new monument at the "Carleton Cairn," memorializing the 120 emigrants murdered by Mormon settlers and their Indian accomplices.
   In September, the LDS Church rejected a state recommendation that the artifacts be returned to the grave. Instead, church officials agreed with another organization of wagon train descendants that the items be placed on display at a museum in Berryville, Ark., where many of the emigrants hailed from.
   Opponents of the church's actions have now demanded the state Division of History intervene and return the artifacts to the resting place of the deceased.
   "Despite the fact that historic sites are entitled to special protections, the state failed to extend even ordinary protections in this instance,"   Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation President Scott Fancher wrote Tuesday in a letter to Max Evans, director of the Division of History. "This letter constitutes a formal demand . . . that the state take action to effect the immediate return, and an unobtrusive repatriation, of any and all possessions of the deceased which were removed from or near the Carleton Cairn at Mountain Meadows . . ."
   State officials have yet to receive the letter, but Wilson Martin, director of cultural preservation for the Division of History, reiterated that the agency is unsure if it legally can prohibit removal of grave goods from privately owned property.
   "Really at this point we don't know what authority we have regarding those artifacts, the laws are still a little fuzzy and we're working that through," said Martin, who helped craft many of the state statutes protecting antiquities. "This issue has never really come up and now when it does, it's in a very emotional case with one of the most high-profile landowners in the state."
   Representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have said they tried to "honor the wishes of many -- but admittedly not all -- of the descendants" in allowing the Mountain Meadows  artifacts to go on display. The decision was supported by the Mountain Meadows  Association, which partnered with the church to design and build the new monument at the massacre  site near St. George.
   The association and foundation have been at odds since the excavation of the bones and the ensuing controversies over studying the human remains and withholding the artifacts.  In a separate letter delivered Monday to LDS Museum of Church History and Art Director Glen Leonard, Fancher said the foundation members regretted the coming confrontation over the artifacts.
   "Those items which belong to the dead must be left with the dead," wrote Fancher. "To do otherwise disrespects their memory."  

A&E'S `THE REAL WEST' 04/01/1993
 
SLTribune
Date: 04/01/1993  Category: Local
Page: C7
Keywords: Television Column

A&E'S `THE REAL WEST' EXPLORES MOUNTAIN MEADOW MASSACRE 

Byline: By Harold Schindler

   The Mountain Meadow massacre! Makes your blood run cold just saying the words. So many people have heard of it -- yet so few know anything about it.
   For more than a century it was whispered in Utah and shouted elsewhere that Mormons painted as Indians murdered 100 emigrants in a wagon train somewhere in the southern part of the territory.

   The Mountain Meadows Massacre is the title of The Real West program tonight at 6 and again at 10 on A&E.     When The Real West debuted on the Arts & Entertainment cable network last year with Kenny Rogers as its narrator/host, the series was an instant favorite with viewers hungry for stories about cowboys and Indians, gunfighters and the rest of the lore of the West.

   Now The Real West is about to embark on its second season, and the audience for western history is larger than ever.

   With that kind of pressure, The Real West can be forgiven an occasional lapse of research or misspoken word. But it is important to understand that lapses do occur, and words, indeed, are sometimes twisted.    In a segment on gunfighters, the narrator spoke of ``William Alonzo Hickok,'' known as ``Wild Bill.'' But notorious Wild Bill Hickok's name actually was James Butler Hickok.

   In last week's episode, Rogers discussed William F. ``Buffalo Bill'' Cody scalping the Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hand, but referred to him as Yellow Hair, the name the Sioux pinned on George Custer.

   John D. Lee was a devout Mormon and an early settler in Utah's Dixie. Contrary to prevailing notion he was not a bishop. Nor, as Real West stated, was he an Indian agent.

    What The Real West does with Mountain Meadows is give a broad overview of what and how.  Nothing definitive, certainly nothing malicious or apologetic. It tells a superficial story, but truth is, no other network television production has had the gumption to give it a whirl, and that stands for something.

   About 10 years ago, I heard CBS considered such a script, but scrapped it for reasons one can only speculate upon.

   To provide a background for the massacre, the series uses a number of historians and writers to sketch out the early history of the Mormon Church and its troubles; including the outrage over plural marriage.  When Joseph Smith, Mormonism's founding prophet, was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Ill., many of his staunchest followers swore vengeance on enemies of the church, a vow they nurtured through the years in Utah.

   The Fancher train was comprised of Arkansans emigrating to California in 1857; they took a trail through Utah at a time when the U.S. Army was escorting a new governor to replace Brigham Young.

    Real West did not point out that Parley P. Pratt, a Mormon general authority, had been murdered in Arkansas by a jealous husband that very May, and the church members in Utah were aware of it by June. The Fanchers caught the brunt of the animosity at a time when Utah settlers were counseled not to deal with non-Mormons, but to prepare instead for a siege by the Army.

   The emigrants, it has been said, did not understand this and put themselves in peril by threatening the outlying Mormon settlements as the wagon train lumbered west on the southern route through the St. George area.

   Paiutes in the region were encouraged by church leaders in Parowan and Cedar City to attack the emigrants as they camped in Mountain Meadow on the old Spanish Trail south of Enterprise. After the initial assault, the Arkansans fought back and held out for almost a week. Lee had been summoned to persuade the party to give up its arms and be ``escorted to safety'' by Mormon militiamen called to the scene.

   It was an act of treachery, however, and once out in the open, the Indians ambushed the women and children; the militiamen shot down the surviving men. The dead numbered more than five score and were pitched into shallow graves scattered around the meadow. Seventeen children under age 8 were spared and parceled out to Mormon homes, until they were gathered up by the federal government two years later.

   John D. Lee, after almost 20 years an exile and a fugitive among his own people, was convicted and executed by firing squad in 1877 at the meadow.

The Salt Lake Tribune, May 1, 2002

                                Expert Explains Why He Thinks Scroll Fake
                                             Flaws Reveal Scroll as Fake, Expert Says
                                                                                                                                                                    BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH  

   From the way the characters were written to the tool used to inscribe them, several mistakes were made by the author of a lead scroll allegedly signed by Mountain Meadows Massacre participant John D. Lee, says a forgery expert.
   To verify the authenticity of a sheet of lead inscribed with the date Jan. 11, 1872, the National Park Service hired the two professional document examiners who exposed Utah forger-bomber Mark Hofmann in 1986.  Rolled into a cylinder, the leaden letter was discovered Jan. 22 by a volunteer cleaning out Lee's Fort at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., along the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
   In blocky, all-capital letters, the inscription claimed early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Brigham Young ordered the 1857 attack and slaughter of 120 members of an Arkansas wagon train at the height of federal tensions in territorial Utah. Lee was banished by Mormon leaders to the ferry site and was the only participant ever tried and convicted in the mass murder. He was executed by firing squad in 1877 after claiming he was being "sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner."
   Exposing the scroll as a fraud had less to do with what the words said than how they were written, said William Flynn of Phoenix, who revealed his findings this week following a meeting of the Southwestern Association of Forensic Document Exam- iners.
   His partner in the investigation, George Throckmorton of Salt Lake City, declined to discuss his findings until making a report to the Park Service. But Flynn said the two veteran investigators have concurred privately that the scroll was clearly not written by Lee.
   "There was a consistent mistake by whoever did it," said Flynn. Writers of Lee's period were accustomed to using a split pen-point, the nibs of which would spread when writing a vertical character stroke, leaving behind a wide or even double vertical line.
   The telltale double-vertical "stress" pattern was common to all of Lee's handwriting, whether he was using a pen, pencil or chipping petroglyphs on a rock canyon wall with a knife blade, said Flynn. But the person who inscribed the lead scroll may have tried too hard to replicate the notorious killer's handwriting.
   "The writer used double verticals and double horizontals, which was not consistent with Lee's handwriting patterns," said Flynn, owner of Affiliated Forensic Lab Inc. "If the forger had stopped and just made a single stroke on the horizontal characters, it would have been more consistent."
   The mistake was just one of several clues leading Flynn to conclude the scroll was not authentic:
   * Photos taken through a microscope show the characters were inscribed using an object with a tip shaped like a pyramid, rather than a sharp or rounded point. Flynn said a modern finishing nail inserted into the depressions "fit perfectly." Small nails with such precisely cut facets on the tips did not exist in the 1870s.
   * No historical evidence of Lee writing in block letters exists. LDS Church officials allowed Throckmorton to view and digitally photograph Lee's original diaries now held in church archives, which were then used by the examiners to compare handwriting with the scroll.
   * Lee would have no reason to write in all capital letters, since writing in cursive on the malleable lead would not have been difficult, said Flynn.
   Both Flynn and Throck- morton are studying the oxidation pattern of the lead, which is suspicious because it is uniformly yellow and orange, even though the sheet was rolled into a scroll when discovered. Flynn will attempt to replicate the oxidation on another lead scroll in his lab, to see if the discoloration is uniform or is banded because of being rolled up.
   Glen Canyon National Recreation Area spokeswoman Char Obergh said Tuesday the park was waiting to receive formal reports from Flynn and Throckmorton before deciding what to do with the sheet, whose true author remains a mystery.
   Flynn said the similarities with Hofmann's prolific forgeries of documents related to Mormon history crossed his mind during the scroll examination, and he was even more intrigued when he learned police discovered lead sheets at Hofmann's home during their murder investigation in 1986.
   "This would certainly be within his capabilities and we know he had similar materials he was playing with at the time," said Flynn. "But I have nothing to go on other than the modus operandi, especially the nature of the document being highly controversial, seems to fit the types of things he did in the past."
  

MASSACRE VICTIMS WILL GET A `FITTING MEMORIAL ... 04/01/1999
The Salt Lake Tribune
Section: Utah
Date: 04/01/1999

Byline: BY MARK HAVNES and LOREN WEBB THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
  
   MOUNTAIN MEADOWS --Scientists using ground-penetrating radar are looking beneath Mountain Meadows , hoping to locate the burial sites of 120 California-bound emigrants who were massacred 141 years ago by Mormon settlers and Paiute Indians.
   The subsurface survey along with a soil analysis are being conducted in preparation of an upgrade of the site's memorial, trails and plaques. The work is a cooperative effort between the Mountain Meadows Association and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
   Ron Loving, president of the association, says the project could not have progressed to this point without the "spirit of reconciliation" from the church. Much of the church's effort has been prompted by President Gordon B. Hinckley, who has been troubled by the massacre since 1947, when he first visited the site 35 miles northwest of St. George with his father.
   The church and the association want to honor those who died with a fitting memorial and explanatory plaques at the site, which has fallen into disrepair through vandalism, neglect and the elements.
   Scientific work was conducted by Coloradans John Lindemann, a forensic geologist, and Clark Davenport, a forensic geophysicist. Their expenses were covered by the association, but they donated their time and equipment.
   The pair are experts at locating archaeological sites, clandestine graves and illegal dumping locations, Davenport says. They have worked in 33 states and seven countries.
   They hope the radar can find anomalies in the soil pattern that would indicate a possible grave. They cannot pinpoint the exact date of burial without digging it up, which the association will not allow.
   The scientists also are searching the soil for chemical concentrations, such as calcium, that would indicate possible burial sites. They also hope to identify the location where, on Sept. 7, 1857, the Baker-Fancher party circled their wagons against a siege that ended five days later with the slaying of men, women and children.
   Loving says the information, in addition to aerial photographs, still has to be evaluated. The work is being conducted so that the site will never be violated again.
   "We do not want those bodies disturbed and the church is honoring that request," says Loving, an aerospace-systems engineer in Tucson, Ariz., who is related to 12 of the emigrants who died.
   The LDS Church plans to build and maintain a memorial on 2.5 acres it owns at the massacre site. The association will be responsible for other improvements, including identifying and marking grave sites, road upgrades, a parking lot, restrooms and plaques explaining what happened at Mountain Meadows. The association is looking for donations and new members to help complete the projects.
   The first memorial erected at the site was a 12-foot-high rock cairn constructed by U.S. Army troops in 1859 as a memorial marker to the massacre victims.
   Other monuments were made in 1932 by the Utah Trails and Landmarks Association and in 1990 by the state and families of the victims. Another memorial was constructed in 1955 in Arkansas where the Baker-Fancher wagon train began. The monument was erected by the Richard Fancher Society of America in Harrison.
   The latest plans are the most ambitious for the massacre site and are the first involving the LDS Church.
   Loving says plans for the improvements began last September when the victims' descendants gathered at Mountain Meadows to commemorate the massacre and were disturbed by the deplorable condition of the site.
   Loving says the association contacted the LDS Church through Glen Leonard, director of the Church Museum of History and Art in Salt Lake City. Leonard has worked closely with Loving on the project ever since.
   Hinckley is one of the project's biggest backers.
   Last October, while being driven to the St. George airport after a dedication at Dixie College, Hinckley said he felt "compelled" to visit Mountain Meadows.
   Soon after his visit, a meeting was arranged between church officials, including Hinckley, and the association. The meeting was held Oct. 30 at the church's administration building in Salt Lake City. Loving, who kept minutes of the meeting, which are posted on the association's Web site, (www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com) describes a gracious Hinckley, greeting each group member before ushering them into a conference room.
   Hinckley told the association that he was ashamed and embarrassed at the condition of the monument. "I resolved there to do something about it," he said.
   The church leader then presented three proposed renditions for a memorial by church architect Lee Grey, who designed the Assembly Building now under construction north of Salt Lake City's Temple Square.
   Speaking of the massacre, Hinckley said to his guests that no one really knows what happened at Mountain Meadows or can explain it.
   "But we [the church] express our regrets over what happened there and we all need to put this behind us," he said. "We need to eliminate the hatred."
   Association board member Kent Bylund, a Mountain Meadows landowner and association board member, said he is excited about seeing the paradigm surrounding Mountain Meadows shift from "Why did it happen?" to "There is nothing wrong with honoring the dead at the site."
   He also says Hinckley has asked church members in the area to donate their time and efforts to the renovation project.
   Since the day it happened, the massacre has represented a disturbing chapter in LDS history. It is known that Mormons and Paiutes took part in the killings, but what exactly happened and who was involved never has been fully explained to everyone's satisfaction. Instead, it has fostered a legacy of guilt among some church members and rendered the church an easy target of ridicule from critics.
   Only one person was ever prosecuted for participating in the crime. Brigham Young's adopted son, John D. Lee, was tried in 1877 and convicted for his part in the killings, then executed at the massacre site after delivering a dissertation on how he felt he had been betrayed.
   University of Utah history professor Dean May says the event has to be viewed in historical context. At the time, the territory was under a siege mentality. Young had declared marshal law and was mustering a militia in anticipation of federal troops, who that same fall were marching toward Utah to quash a perceived rebellion by polygamous Mormons against the U.S. government.
   "It was uncharacteristic of the Mormons to react as they did [at Mountain Meadows]," May says, noting after the massacre  of Mormons in Missouri and the murder of church founder Joseph Smith in Illinois, the "Mormons just buried their dead and went on with construction of the temple."
 

Nation's Anthropologists Evalu ... 12/01/2001
The Salt Lake Tribune
Date: 12/01/2001   
 
Nation's Anthropologists Evaluate LDS Culture
StudiesTake a Look at LDS Culture
BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH   THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON  --  For a first taste of Mormon culture, the menu presented to the world's largest professional association of anthropologists was on the spicy side: The troubles of corroborating archaeology with Book of Mormon geography; the secret struggle of gay missionaries; and institutional historical amnesia about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
      The scholarly studies presented this week to the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) might cause a little heartburn in Utah. But in the nation's capital, what was believed to be the first organized session on Mormonism and anthropology in the venerable organization's 100-year history was digested with relish.
      "It's so rare that it must be a first," said University of Maryland anthropologist Mark Leone, author of the 1979 Harvard University Press book, Roots of Modern Mormonism. "It's special. And very brave."
     The public affairs office of the LDS Church did not respond to requests by The Salt Lake Tribune for comment on the AAA program on Mormonism and anthropology.
      Explaining that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has traditionally not welcomed secular scientific critiques of the institution, Leone had advice for anthropologists probing Mormonism and its followers: "Do it right. Be decisive. Be descriptive. Publish widely. Use the media. Be scared. And scare. We are not dealing with a timid institution."
      It was a caution not lost on the session organizer, anthropologist David Knowlton, visiting professor at the University of Utah. Although he made no mention of it to the AAA audience, church-owned Brigham Young University fired   Knowlton in 1993, saying his research to date did not qualify him for a permanent faculty position. However, his research on terrorist attacks on Latin American LDS churches and why some activists view Mormon missionaries as symbols of U.S. imperialism had been condemned by church leaders in 1991 as potentially dangerous to Mormon missionaries in the region.
   While Mormon culture is not often examined by secular scholars, it has not been ignored. The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, an interdisciplinary organization made up of secular scholars from sociology, religious studies, psychology, anthropology, economics, and communications, has looked at Mormonism for more than two decades.
   Knowlton told fellow anthropologists that with the LDS Church's rapid membership growth, it is a critical area for inquiry today.
   "All one has to do is listen to the general conference of the church to hear the confidence, the aplomb, the assurance with which the church presents itself to the world," he said. "They occupy and dominate an entire region of the United States in a way no other denomination does and that makes the Mormons somewhat unusual."
   "Unusual" may have been a relative term at this annual gathering of some 4,000 professional practitioners of anthropology, a multidisciplinary field that has more than 100 different definitions but basically revolves around the study of humankind through archaeology, biology, culture and linguistics. Sprinkled amid 400 presentations with titles such as "Active Cognition in Bartending" and "Hidden Bodies: Concealing Female Victims of Homicide," the program called "Threats to History, Selves and Bodies as Cosmogony: Anthropology and Mormonism" didn't seem out of the ordinary.
   The session papers reviewed by the Society for Anthropology of Religion and presented to the meeting included:
  Knowlton's ethnographic study on how Mormons view sex and their bodies in relation to personal discipline and expectations of the collective identity shared by most church members.
   Knowlton surveyed several returned missionaries and married Mormon men who were trying to resolve personal questions of sexual orientation. Since the LDS Church views same-sex behavior as a sin and same-sex attraction as something that can be "overcome," Knowlton said many of the closet-gay Mormon men he interviewed were deeply conflicted over their identity. "A critical aspect of the Latter-day Saint self is not enclosed within the individual, it is an aspect of the self that is primarily dominated by the church," he said.
  A contemporary ethnography of Mormon missionaries and their psychological identity battles in the field by University of Pennsylvania cultural anthropologist Melvin Hammarberg, who interviewed both active and returned missionaries.
   He found while most missionaries came home strengthened in their beliefs and identities as church members, some were challenged by exposure to new cultures, separation from home and coping with suppressed sexual urges. He related a poignant account of a gay-male returned missionary who had fallen in love with his mission companion and sought counseling from his mission president. The young man was asked if he physically was capable of achieving an erection and, answering yes, was told "the commandment still holds," that he must marry a woman and have children, that his suppressed homosexuality was something he must live with, similar to someone who must live without the use of arms or legs. Hammarberg said that while other missionaries reported strengthening of their faith by suppressing same-sex urges, "all of them carry a huge cross throughout their lives."
  An analysis of scientific evidence gathered from the 1999 forensic study of bones of emigrants massacred at the hands of a Mormon militia 150 years ago at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah, by University of Utah anthropologists Shannon Novak and Lars Rodseth.
   Novak's landmark analysis of the exhumed bones of 29 massacre victims identified no wounds that would corroborate the traditional Mormon historical accounts that Paiute Indians aided in the murders by scalping, cutting throats or shooting emigrants with arrows. The two researchers contrast these findings to the series of sometimes ambiguous monuments and memorials that dot the meadows, including the LDS Church-sponsored monument placed in 1999 atop the mass grave that does not name any victims but instead recognizes the contribution of Church President Gordon B. Hinckley. "The remains of the victims lie beneath a memorial to memorials, what amounts in fact to an advertisement for the LDS Church and its generosity to the dead," the U. researchers wrote.
  University of Alabama psychological anthropologist Charles Nuckoll's assessment of Mormonism's conflict of both needing and rejecting history to validate the faith by examining the argument over whether a pre-Columbian sculpture found in Mexico illustrates the "Tree of Life," a Book of Mormon story and image that is used frequently in LDS temples to illustrate abiding principles of Mormonism.
   Although most secular scholars doubt that the so-called Izapa Stela 5 stone has any relation to Book of Mormon geography or theology, many Mormon researchers and faithful believe it is scientific proof of the veracity of the Book of Mormon. While promoting the possibility that such evidence exists, church leaders have discouraged followers from relying on archaeological findings to validate the faith. Church leaders "recommend Mormons dispense with historical proofs, since such proofs do not bear on questions of faith," according to Nuckolls. "Faith decrees that Mormons believe in the history, but the history itself does not exist to validate that faith. In fact, [leaders say] history is irrelevant to faith even though history must be true in order for the faith to be true."
   Leone, the University of Maryland anthropologist who was selected by AAA to review the papers and lead a discussion of the findings, said the research on Mormonism was a "critique of the institution."
   "How to think about Mormonism and its effect on its adherents and those within its orbit, that's definitely our purpose at this particular time in American history," he said. "It is a critique that is not wanted, but nonetheless it is an essential critique."
   [email protected]

The Salt Lake Tribune

LDS Church Pledges to Rebuild Mountain Meadows Grave Marker; Mass burial holds victims of massacre by militant Mormons, Indians
Byline: BY ROBERT GEHRKE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    A pile of rubble and rocks is all that marks the resting place of 34 members of a wagon train, ambushed and massacred 141 years ago by militant Mormons and a band of Paiute Indians.
   The victims of the slaughter had camped at Mountain Meadows, a pastoral area in Utah's southwestern corner and a common campsite on the Spanish Trail. The Baker-Fancher party   --  numbering 120 men, women and children, mostly from Arkansas  --   was en route to California when it was besieged and, after being promised safe passage to nearby Cedar City, ruthlessly slaughtered.
   ``There was nothing like it in the history of the West and it's the second-largest loss of life in America's move west,'' said David Bigler, a historian and author from Roseville, Calif., who has written on the topic.
   But the site of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, 250 miles southeast of Salt Lake, had been largely ignored until this decade. In 1990, descendants of both sides erected a monument overlooking the field. Now, the Mormon church has volunteered to rebuild the marker on the mass grave, first erected in 1859.
   The offer by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is viewed as a departure from the faith's history of reluctance in acknowledging the role of Mormon settlers in the Mountain Meadows massacre.
   ``They finally have a man in the [church] president's seat that knows the story and understands the pain and anguish that a lot of the families are still going through,'' said Ron Loving of Tucson, Ariz., whose great-great uncle led the wagon train. Thirteen other Loving ancestors also perished in the attack.
   Loving is referring to Mormon church President Gordon B. Hinckley. In 1990, when he was the church's No. 2 man, Hinckley dedicated the monument at Mountain Meadows.
   Last October, Hinckley again visited the site and was saddened by the condition of the mass-grave marker. He called Loving and offered the church's services and funds to rebuild the memorial.
   ``I did not like what I saw,'' Hinckley said during a meeting on Oct. 30. ``I was embarrassed at the condition . . . I was ashamed.''
   Memorializing the site has been a decade-long task for the Mountain Meadows Association, a group of descendants of victims.
   Harsh winters caused the monument to fall apart shortly after it was erected in 1990. Last month, the state, which assumed the task of maintaining the monument, finished extensive repairs.
   Now Hinckley has committed the church to building a park-like memorial.
   The association has set Jan. 18 as the deadline for voting on the new monument's design, with work scheduled to begin in the spring, weather permitting, and be completed sometime during the summer.
   ``It will cost whatever it costs and we will do it so it's nice,'' said Glen Leonard, director of the Museum of Church History and Art. Loving said Hinckley told him it may cost as much as $200,000.
   Historians believe the massacre stemmed from anti-government sentiments and Mormons' fears of invasion and persecution by the U.S. Army.
   Blame for the attack was laid on John D. Lee, a zealous Mormon portrayed by the church as a rogue major in the Mormon militia. He and others were excommunicated from the church and Lee was tried and executed at Mountain Meadows nearly 20 years after the slaughter.
   For the next 140 years, the church kept its distance from Mountain Meadows, said Bigler.
   But in their October meeting, Hinckley made what Loving called the most direct apology for the incident.
   ``No one knows fully what happened at Mountain Meadows,'' Hinckley said, according to the meeting's minutes. ``But we express our regrets over what happened there and we all need to put this behind us.''
   Loving was shaken by the comments.
   ``President Hinckley's words, I never thought I'd hear, and neither did anybody else who was in that meeting,'' said Loving. ``We have come a long way in the last three months from the last 141 years, and the majority of it is due to President Hinckley's insight and feeling of what we feel about those people who are buried up there.''The public can vote on a preferred design for the grave-site memorial at the Mountain Meadows Association's Web site at: http://www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com.
  

The Salt Lake Tribune, March 12, 2000

"Unearthing Mountain Meadows Secrets:
Backhoe at a S. Utah killing field rips open 142-year-old wound"
Part 1 (Of 3 Part Series)

by Christopher Smith

Editor's Note: Mountain Meadows, southwest of Cedar City, is the site of the worst slaughter of white civilians in the history of the frontier West. Last summer, LDS Church officials and descendants of the victims sought to finally close the 142-year-old wound. Together they were to build and dedicate a new monument to the 120 Arkansas emigrants who perished in unimaginable violence at the hands of Mormon settlers and Indian accomplices.

The new memorial stands, but the wound still festers. In constructing the monument, workers uncovered remains of 29 victims, a vivid and horrific reminder of that September day in 1857. The story of those bones, and what happened to them last summer, adds another excruciating chapter to the history of a crime that many of Utah's pioneer descendants can neither confront nor explain.

MOUNTAIN MEADOWS -- After burying dozens of men, women and children murdered in a bizarre frontier conspiracy, an Army major ordered his soldiers to erect a rockpile and a carved wooden cross swearing vengeance on the perpetrators. Brevet Maj. James H. Carleton then wrote to Congress: "Perhaps the future may be judged by the past."
They were fated words. When a backhoe operator last summer accidentally dug up the bones buried here in 1859 by Carleton's troops, it set into motion a series of cover-ups, accusations and recriminations that continue today. It also caused a good-faith effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- to reconcile one of the ugliest chapters of U.S. history -- to backfire. The Aug. 3, 1999, excavation of the remains of at least 29 of the 120 emigrants slaughtered in the Mountain Meadows massacre eventually prompted Gov. Mike Leavitt to intercede. He encouraged state officials to quickly rebury the remains, even though the basic scientific analysis required by state law was unfinished.

"It would be unfortunate if this sad moment in our state's history, and the rather good-spirited attempt to put it behind us, was highlighted by controversy," Leavitt wrote in an e-mail message to state antiquities officials shortly before LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley presided over a ceremony at Mountain Meadows.

The widely publicized occasion was to dedicate a newly rebuilt rock cairn monument, crafted with the same stones Carleton's troops had piled defiantly in 1859. They also were the same rocks that were torn down from the grave site by one of Leavitt's own ancestors. Dudley Leavitt, himself a participant in the Sept. 11, 1857, murders, visited the cairn with LDS prophet Brigham Young a year after Carleton's troops left.

After ridiculing the pledge of vengeance, Young lifted his right arm toward the rock pile and "in five minutes there wasn't one stone left upon another," Dudley Leavitt would recall. "He didn't have to tell us what he wanted done. We understood."
The governor's intercession was one of many dramas played out last summer, all serving to underscore Mountain Meadows' place as the Bermuda Triangle of Utah's historical and theological landscape. The end result may be another sad chapter in the massacre's legacy of bitterness, denial and suspicion.

In retracing the latest episode, The Salt Lake Tribune conducted numerous interviews and researched documents obtained under Utah's Government Records Access and Management Act to find:
-- Co-sponsors of the monument project -- the LDS Church and the Mountain Meadows Association -- initially hoped to cover up the excavation, with the MMA demanding any documentation be "kept out of public view permanently." The president of the association, Ron Loving, wrote in an Aug. 9 e-mail to the director of the Utah Division of History: "The families [descended from victims] and the LDS church will work out what we want to become public knowledge on this accidental finding."
-- The vain effort to hide the truth gave rise to wild conspiracy theories among some descendants. They suspected Loving was working with the LDS Church to rewrite history by having church-owned Brigham Young University determine the exhumed victims died of disease, not murder. "I call it 'sanitizing' a foul deed," Burr Fancher wrote to other descendants Aug. 24.
-- Utah Division of History Director Max Evans, over the objections of state Archaeologist Kevin Jones, personally rewrote BYU's state archaeological permit to require immediate reburial of the bones after receiving the governor's e-mail. Jones raised numerous questions over the political power play, including a concern it was "eth- nocentric and racist" to rebury the bones of white emigrants without basic scientific study when similar American Indian remains are routinely subjected to such analysis before repatriation. -- News of the excavation triggered written requests to BYU from people around the nation, seeking to determine if their ancestors were among the recovered victims. Some offered to submit to DNA testing and desired to reinter the remains in family burial plots outside of Utah. Although the Utah Attorney General's Office had advised state officials that "any and all lineal descendants of the Mountain Meadows massacre would appear to have a voice in determining the disposition of the bodies," there is little documented evidence any of the people seeking information about family members were consulted.
-- Resentment over the discovery and of the remains has caused a schism in the descendant families, with at least one organized group asking why civil or criminal penalties were not brought against the LDS Church or the MMA for desecrating the grave. There also is confusion over who is now in charge of the MMA. While new president Gene Sessions of Weber State University says Loving was voted out of office in November in the wake of the controversy, Loving says he's still the boss: "I wasn't voted out of a damn thing. I was moved up. It was my methods and my way of doing business that got that monument done."
Other descendants have enlisted the support of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in calling for federal stewardship of the emigrant mass graves scattered in Mountain Meadows, instead of having the Mormon Church own the land.
"We're doubtful with the church in control this will ever be completely put to rest," says Scott Fancher, president of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas. "There's a sense among some of our members it's like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK's tomb."

Glen M. Leonard, director of the Museum of Church History and Art and Hinckley's personal representative in the process, said the church endeavored with the MMA to gather comment from all descendants through the association's Web page and newsletter.

"While this was not a perfect method for reaching all members of all branches of all families, it was a practical means for the church and the association to inform most of them with interest in the grave site restoration project," Leonard says. "We are sorry if some descendants of the emigrant families feel left out."

Marian Jacklin, an archaeologist with the Dixie National Forest in Cedar City who has spent years trying to navigate the emotional minefield of Mountain Meadows, says the events of last summer did not yield the desired consequences.
"This whole episode didn't answer anything," she says. "It just asked more questions."
And the question that burns in the minds of many angry descendants is: Why was a backhoe digging at a known, well-marked grave site?

"What we understood in every correspondence, and we thought we had made perfectly clear to the church, was that under no circumstances would the remains be disturbed," says Scott Fancher, whose organization is considering legal action over the excavation. "Never in my wildest imagination did we expect them to set a backhoe on this grave and start digging."
Hinckley had personally launched the effort to stabilize the decaying rock cairn -- rebuilt at least 11 times since Carleton's troops placed the stones -- after a visit to the site in October 1998. The 2.5 acres was deeded to the church in the 1970s after the landowner reportedly tried in vain to find descendants in Arkansas to accept the donation of land.
Partnering with the MMA -- a group of emigrant descendants, historians and interested southwestern Utah residents -- LDS Church architects designed a monument with a thigh-high stone wall around the old cairn, perched on a steep stream bank.
There are conflicting accounts of whether descendants understood the wall would require digging a trench around the grave for a concrete footing. Some MMA members, including the contractor, interpreted the "do not disturb" edict to cover the pre-construction archaeological investigation. Once the archaeologists said all clear, crews could dig the footing, they believed.
But Scott Fancher says his branch of the family understood the wall would be "surface-mounted," in keeping with the church's pledge not to disturb the burial ground in any way.

Before beginning, the LDS Church had hired BYU's Office of Public Archaeology to conduct a non-invasive archaeological survey. Using ground-penetrating radar, aerial photos, metal detectors and hundreds of soil-sample tests to search for signs of bones or artifacts, a team of professionals scoured the area.

"The archaeological evidence was 100 percent negative," says Shane Baker, the BYU staff archaeologist who directed the study. "I went to our client, the church, and said either this is not the spot or every last shred of evidence has been erased."
There was speculation that bones buried beneath the cairn had been exposed to the elements and deteriorated. Or, they had been washed down the ravine, the cairn was in the wrong place or the cairn was directly on top of the bones.
But today, Baker admits the archaeological examination at the location where the bones were eventually disturbed was not as complete as it was in other areas. The narrow spot between the cairn and streambank was not probed with radar because the trailer-like unit could not be towed near the precarious edge. Instead, Baker took soil core samples, using a bucket auger, which strained against the impacted earth.

He again found nothing. Witnesses would later draw an analogy to a magician thrusting swords into a box containing an assistant and somehow missing the mark. "Shane came within inches of the remains and it is amazing that no evidence was determined," says Kent Bylund of St. George, an association board member and adjacent Mountain Meadows landowner who served as project contractor. "I sincerely believe everything was done to ensure the area to be excavated was core sampled and thoroughly examined before excavation was permitted."

BYU's Baker blames the accidental discovery of bones on the restrictions placed on the investigation by the LDS Church.
"We were not allowed to do the kind of testing we would do normally, and I was concerned the whole time we were going to hit bone," he says. "The very fact they wouldn't let me dig with a shovel and a trowel is why a backhoe found those bones."
It was on the second or third scoop that more than 30 pounds of human skeletal remains clattered out of the backhoe bucket as it dug the footing trench on Aug. 3. Bylund looked on in disbelief, his heart in his throat.
His first inclination was to put the remains back in the ground and swear the backhoe operator to secrecy. But it was impossible to unring the bell.

"Once they were uncovered, for this new monument to go in, you really had no choice but to remove them because they were dead center in the middle of the new wall," Baker says.
As Baker delicately removed hundreds of pieces of bone from the exposed trench, Loving and Leonard debated what to do and who to tell.

"My plan was to have them reburied within 48 hours of their discovery," says Loving. The Arizona man, whose ancestor was a brother of a massacre victim, took charge, he says, "because the LDS Church considered me as the spokesman for the families in my capacity as president of the Mountain Meadows Association."

But other descendants more directly related to the victims are outraged the church gave Loving such authority. "It's offensive to a lot of people to hear Mr. Loving say this is what the family thinks because we put the church on notice repeatedly that Mr. Loving does not speak for the family and never has," says Scott Fancher. "We are very disappointed we did not have a voice in how the remains were treated after they were disturbed."

Church officials and BYU put Loving in charge and agreed with his plan to rebury within 48 hours. But that plan was foiled on Aug. 5 when Jones, the state archaeologist, informed them Utah law required a basic scientific analysis when human remains are discovered on private property. Failure to comply was a felony.

BYU needed a state permit to legally remove the remains. And, by law, such permits require "the reporting of archaeological information at current standards of scientific rigor. "Although LDS officials knew the descendants would be uncomfortable with the required analysis, they agreed it was necessary, says Leonard.

Jones issued BYU's permit Aug. 6, requiring scientists to determine as best possible, age, sex, race, stature, health condition, cause of death and, because the remains were commingled, to segregate the largest bones and skulls of each individual for proper reburial.

Baker immediately began sorting bones with an assistant in his St. George hotel room, then transferred the remains to BYU's Provo lab and to the University of Utah's forensic anthropology lab in Salt Lake City, which BYU had subcontracted to do the required "osteological" analysis.

Throughout, Loving demanded not a word be said to anyone about the discovery. On Aug. 9, he threatened to sue the state Division of History if Evans did not guarantee in writing the state would adhere to several conditions of secrecy, including "none of the contents of the report, in part or in whole, is released to anyone."

Baker of BYU maintains the secrecy was to allow time to notify family members who did not know of the accidental discovery. "To the credit of the church, they always told me they wanted everything to be open and aboveboard," he says.
Yet many descendants involved in the monument project didn't learn of the discovery until the St. George Spectrum newspaper broke the story Aug. 13, 10 days after the backhoe unearthed the remains. Failing to get answers from state officials whom Loving had told not to talk, many descendants bitterly wondered what was really going on.

Burr Fancher, who had supported the monument reconstruction, was incensed. In an e-mail message circulated to several other descendants, he said Loving was a "lackey in the employ of the Mormon Church and caters to Hinckley's every whim."
The news also triggered a flood of requests to BYU and the state from people wanting to know if their family roots could be traced to Mountain Meadows. On Aug. 22, the Utah Attorney General's Office informed state antiquities officials: "Generally, next of kin is privileged in advancing the burial rights of the deceased absent a compelling state interest." Loving was telling BYU and state officials the families wanted the remains buried Sept. 10 in a private ceremony at Mountain Meadows. But new claims of affiliation complicated matters.

"I went into this blindly and naively assuming the Mountain Meadows Association spoke as a unified voice on behalf of all the descendants and that turned out to be wrong," Baker says today. "On one hand I had descendants demanding I test for DNA, and on the other I had descendants saying they were going to sue my pants off if I did."

By now it was clear scientists would not be able to complete even the baseline scientific analysis in time for the scheduled Sept. 10 reburial ceremony. After a tense meeting with Loving, Jones agreed to a compromise. The examination and segregation of the "long bones" would probably be finished by Sept. 10, and those bones would be placed in the ground at the ceremony. The skulls would require more time, but once that analysis was complete, the cranial material would then be reburied.
Loving says he was "forced to accept" the compromise, but immediately launched an end run. He contacted Dixie Leavitt, the governor's father and a former state senator who played a leading role in the 1990 dedication of another monument overlooking the killing field. Loving warned Dixie Leavitt that unless all the bones were reburied on Sept. 10, there would be an uproar during Hinckley's dedication ceremony.

"I don't recall exactly what I said, but 'disturbance' sounds like a pretty good word," Loving says today.
"I received a call today from my Father (sic) who has been rather involved with the people from Arkansas who are planning to hold a burial and memorial service," Gov. Leavitt wrote in a Sept. 6 e-mail to Wilson Martin, the division's director of cultural preservation and Jones' boss. "Apparently, the State Archaeologist is insisting that some portion of the remains be held from the burial for study. It is apparently causing a lot of angst amongst the family members." Gov. Leavitt responded to The Tribune's questions about his intercession through his press secretary, Vicki Varela. She said the governor "did not feel that it was appropriate for the bones to be dissected and studied in a manner that would prolong the discomfort." Leavitt did not speak to any descendants or family members "other than being notified by his father that there was some risk a respectful event may turn into something of a discomfort for the participants," said Varela. Asked if Leavitt understood there was a state law requiring such study, Varela answered: "I don't think he was knowledgeable of all the details." She said as the CEO of the state, the governor believed "we should find a way to create minimal interference."

Church History Museum director Leonard says it was the decision of the MMA, not the church, to seek an executive exception to the scientific study requirements. "We were aware of the political implications and the emotional implications of this issue," says Leonard. "In hindsight, it is fair to say that the governor's directive to bury those remains not completely analyzed was a humane response to conflicting needs."

Evans drew up a new state antiquities permit for BYU, removing the previous requirement of analysis "in toto" and replacing it with a new requirement that BYU "shall reinter, by Sept. 10, 1999, all human remains into the prepared burial vaults, near the place of discovery." Jones, in a memo to the division files Sept. 9, noted his professional objections.
"To rebury the remains at this point would constitute, in the opinion of the Antiquities Section, a violation of professional, scientific and ethical responsibilities," Jones wrote. "It also might indeed be seen as demonstrating disrespect for the victims, to bury them once again with bones of many individuals mixed and jumbled, as they were originally disrespectfully interred, in a mass grave of murder victims."But Evans also included a notation on the new permit that could lead to another re-opening of the massacre grave."Since the remains have been interred in a concrete vault, it is possible that further evaluation can take place if all the parties agree, or if a court so orders at some future date," Evans says today. "This is a matter for the family members and the landowner to address, not one the Division of State History expects to be involved in." Early on the morning of Sept. 10, Baker picked up the remains from the U. and drove them to a St. George mortuary. There, the unsegregated bones and skulls of at least 29 people were placed inside four wooden ossuaries and later reburied at the rebuilt monument.

On Sept. 29, Baker sent letters of thanks to Division of History officials explaining how many family members at the memorial service appreciated that all the remains were reinterred. "This certainly represents the positive side of Governor Leavitt's action to intercede on the reburial issue," he wrote. At the same time, Baker said he was professionally conflicted by the precedent set with the political decisions. "The state and its people benefited from this absolutely unique opportunity to, in some small way, try and make amends for the tragic events that transpired there so long ago," Baker wrote in a letter to Jones. "That certainly counts for something. I just hope that some of the other consequences we were all concerned about in connection with the action to rebury do not come back to cause us grief in the future." Again, those would prove fateful words.

The Salt Lake Tribune", March 13, 2000

"Voices of the Dead"
Part 2 (Of 3 Part Series)

by Christopher Smith

Like a grim jigsaw puzzle, University of Utah forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak has pieced together the results of crime and warfare, meticulously re-assembling the bones of people who met violent ends. Her expertise has taken her to the mass graves of Croatia, where she joined a team of other experts in gathering evidence for prosecution of Serbian war crimes. She recently deciphered the bones of soldiers found on the bloodiest battlefield of Britain's Wars of Roses in 1461, questioning the romantic views of chivalry in medieval battle. The situations are frequently tense, the work is tedious and the results are never pretty. But always, the truth ends up in sharper focus.

"Typically with history, the winning side writes the story," Novak says.. "This is giving the dead a chance to speak."
She took that same sense of purpose into a Utah polemic that began last summer. While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was working to rebuild a monument to victims of the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, the skeletal remains of at least 29 slain emigrants were accidentally dug up by a church contractor on Aug. 3. That scientists were required to study the bones of the massacre victims before they could be returned to their resting-place became the flash point in a five-week struggle that ended with a private reburial ceremony Sept. 10. The studies, normally required by state law of all accidentally discovered human remains, were terminated prematurely after Gov. Mike Leavitt personally intervened.In a message to state antiquities officials, Leavitt wrote that he did not want controversy to highlight "this sad moment in our state's history and the rather good-spirited attempt to put it behind us."

Novak, along with a handful of other scientists, archaeologists and state antiquities officials, got caught in a political tug-of-war that pitted the need for scientific inquiry against the desire to respect the wishes of some descendants, who viewed the analysis as adding insult to injury. "Arkansas people have two virtues -- caring for the sick and respecting the dead," Burr Fancher, a direct descendant of the massacre victims, wrote Aug. 24 to Brigham Young University's Office of Public Archaeology, which subcontracted with Novak to conduct the forensic analysis. "One of our fundamental beliefs has been grossly violated so that a few people could play with bones and for what reason? Everyone knows who was buried there and every serious student of history knows why it happened."

Yet at the same time, there is little widespread public knowledge of a crime of civil terrorism that pales in modern U.S. history only to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The slaughter of an estimated 120 white civilians by a cabal of Mormon zealots and Indians is never mentioned in school history textbooks and is not even listed as a "point of interest" on Utah's official highway map. Until recent additions, the interpretive signs at Mountain Meadows were so vague as to how the Arkansas emigrants died that they became a source of national ridicule. "All across the United States, when the dominant group has committed wicked deeds, historical markers either omit the acts or write of them in the passive voice," James W. Loewen writes in his new book, Lies Across America, which devotes a chapter to Mountain Meadows. "Thus, the landscape does what it can to help the dominant stay dominant and the rest of us stay ignorant about who actually did what in American history."

When the serene landscape at Mountain Meadows suddenly yielded hard evidence of one of the most gruesome crimes of western settlement, debate erupted over the need to delve further."It is not important we know exactly how these people were murdered; we already know they were killed," says Weber State University history professor Gene Sessions, a Mountain Meadows scholar who serves as the president of the Mountain Meadows Association. "There's nothing those bones could show us that we don't already know from the documentary evidence."

But others disagree. "Those bones could tell the story and this was their one opportunity," says Marian Jacklin, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist in Cedar City. "I have worked with many of these descedants for years and understand their feelings. But as a scientist, I would allow my own mother's bones to be studied in a respectful way if it would benefit medicine or history."

Kevin Jones, state archaeologist, was overruled in his efforts to adhere to the state law requiring a basic analysis of the remains. "The truth has never been fully told by anyone and there's plenty of information we could have learned here," he says. "We know they were murdered, but we don't know the details. And none of these people today can speak for every one of those people buried there."

Before the bones were placed back into the earth in the wake of the abrupt change in a state antiquities permit, they had started to reveal their secrets. In a 30-hour, round-the-clock forensic marathon, Novak and her students at the U. managed to reassemble several of the skulls before BYU officials arrived early on the morning of Sept. 10 to take the bones away.
Her results, which are still being compiled for future publication in a scientific journal, confirm much of the documentary record. But they also provide chilling new evidence that contradicts some conventional beliefs about what happened during the massacre.

For instance, written accounts generally claim the women and older children were beaten or bludgeoned to death by Indians using crude weapons, while Mormon militiamen killed adult males by shooting them in the back of the head. However, Novak's partial reconstruction of approximately 20 different skulls of Mountain Meadows victims show:

-- At least five adults had gunshot exit wounds in the posterior area of the cranium -- a clear indication some were shot while facing their killers.. One victim's skull displays a close-range bullet entrance wound to the forehead;
-- Women also were shot in the head at close range. A palate of a female victim exhibits possible evidence of gunshot trauma to the face, based on a preliminary examination of broken teeth;
-- At least one youngster, believed to be about 10 to 12 years old, was killed by a gunshot to the top of the head.
Other findings by Novak from the commingled partial remains of at least 29 individuals -- a count based on the number of right femurs in the hundreds of pieces of bone recovered from the gravesite -- back up the historical record;
-- Five skulls with gunshot entrance wounds in the back of the cranium have no "beveling," or flaking of bone, on the exterior of the skull. This indicates the victims were executed with the gun barrel pointing directly into the head, not at an angle, and at very close range;
-- Two young adults and three children -- one believed to be about 3 years old judging by tooth development -- were killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. Although written records recount that children under the age of 8 were spared, historians believe some babes-in-arms were murdered along with their mothers;
-- Virtually all of the "post-cranial" (from the head down) bones displayed extensive carnivore damage, confirming written accounts that bodies were left on the killing field to be gnawed by wolves and coyotes.

Assisted by graduate student Derinna Kopp and other U. Department of Anthropology volunteers, Novak's team took photographs, made measurements, wrote notes and drew diagrams of the bones, all part of the standard data collection required by law. "I treated this as if it were a recent homicide, conducting the analysis scientifically but with great respect," says Novak. "I'm always extremely conservative in my conclusions. I will only present what I can verify in a court of law."
Beyond the cause of death, Novak was able to discern something about the constitution of the emigrants."These were big, strong, robust men, very heavy boned," she says. "We found tobacco staining on teeth, which is helpful in indicating males, and lots of cavities, indicating they had a diet heavy on carbohydrates." There came a point in the reconstruction where the disparate pieces of bones slowly began to morph into individuals, each with distinct characteristics. One victim had broken an arm and clavicle that had healed improperly. One male had likely been in a brawl that left a healed blunt wound on the back of his head. One youngster's remains all had a distinctive reddish tint; as scientists inventoried the bones they would note another part of "red boy." "We were at the stage when we were distinguishing them as people, where you were getting to know each one," says Novak. "We could have started to match people up. You would never have gotten complete individuals, but given a little more time, we could have done a lot more." But time was up. Novak had concentrated her initial work on the "long bones," as part of an agreement reached between the Division of History, Mountain Meadows Association and Brigham Young University. Those post-cranial remains would be re-interred during a Sept. 10 memorial. Because the reconstruction of the skulls would not be finished by then, the agreement allowed Novak until spring -- about six months -- to do the studies required by state law.

It was late on Sept. 8 that she learned that Division of History Director Max Evans had overruled Jones and re-wrote BYU's antiquities permit, changing the standard requirement for analysis "in toto" to require reburial of all remains on Sept. 10. When BYU asked to pick up the cranial bones on Sept. 9, Novak deferred, saying she had until the next day according to the amended permit.

"It was the only stand I could make because they had changed the rules in the middle of the process with no notice whatsoever," she says. "We worked through the night to get as much done as we could. This data had to be gathered."
BYU archaeologist Shane Baker picked up the remains from Novak early on the morning of Sept. 10, drove them to a St. George mortuary where they were placed in four small wooden ossuaries and then reburied later that day at the newly finished monument.

The dead would say no more. Their remains should never have been queried in the first place, says Weber State historian Sessions. "This idea of Shannon Novak needing six months to mess around with the cranial stuff, well, I know something about that science and that's a fraud," says the Mountain Meadows Association president, who adds he consulted his WSU colleagues about the time needed for such studies. "I really disagree with anyone who says we should have kept the bones out of the ground longer to determine what happened at Mountain Meadows. The documentary evidence is overwhelming. Whether or not little kids were shot in the head or mashed with rocks makes no difference. They were killed."

But other historians, searching for more information about an event cloaked in secrecy for generations, see value in the empirical evidence that forensic anthropology can offer. On Feb. 15, BYU's Baker made an informal presentation of his own photographs and research on the Mountain Meadows remains to the Westerners, an exclusive group of professional and amateur historians who meet monthly. As Baker flashed color slides of the bones on the screen, the men were visibly moved.
"I've dealt with this awful tale on a daily basis for five years, but I found seeing the photos of the remains of the victims profoundly disturbing," says Will Bagley, whose forthcoming book on the massacre, Blood of the Prophets, won the Utah Arts Council publication prize. "It drove home the horror."

But would it convince those who still believe the killing was done solely by Indians, or was part of an anti-Mormon conspiracy or the work of a single, renegade apostate? "My own father believed John D. Lee was the one behind it all and if you think you were going to convince him any differently with empirical proof, forget it," says David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom and former member of the Utah Board of State History. "People want to have the truth, they want it with a capital T and they don't like to have people upset that truth. True believers don't want to think the truth has changed." And according to the leader of the modern Mormon church, the truth has already been told about Mountain Meadows.

The Salt Lake Tribune, March 14, 2000

                          Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Dilemma of Blame
                                                            Part 3 (Of 3 Parts)

by Christopher Smith

MOUNTAIN MEADOWS -- As LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley delivered words of reconciliation at the Sept. 11, 1999, dedication of a rebuilt monument to emigrants slaughtered by Mormon militiamen and their Indian allies 142 years earlier, he added a legal disclaimer.

"That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment of the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day," Hinckley said. The line was inserted into his speech on the advice of attorneys for the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The statement, seemingly out of sync with Hinckley's desire to bring healing to nearly 150 years of bitterness, caused some in attendance to wonder if any progress had really been made at all. If the Mormon Church leadership of 1857 was not at least partially to blame for an estimated 120 people slain at Mountain Meadows, then whom should history hold responsible?
"Well, I would place blame on the local people," Hinckley told The Salt Lake Tribune in a subsequent interview Feb. 23. "I've never thought for one minute -- and I've read the history of that tragic episode -- that Brigham Young had anything to do with it. It was a local decision and it was tragic.. We can't understand it in this time."

For families of the slain emigrants and descendants of LDS pioneer John D. Lee -- the one participant convicted and executed for the crime -- Hinckley's delineation of the church's position on Mountain Meadows compounded many of the misgivings they had about the entire chain of events during the summer.

First, a church contractor's backhoe accidentally exhumed the bones of at least 29 victims Aug. 3 while digging at the grave, even though the church had pledged not to disturb the ground. That was followed by a failed attempt at secrecy, leading to wild speculation and a schism among descendants.

There was a heated debate over whether a state law requiring forensic analysis of the bones should be obeyed, with Gov. Mike Leavitt finally intervening to prematurely terminate the study and ensure that all bones be reburied before the dedication. New forensic anthropology studies done on the bones before reinterment provided the first graphic evidence of the brutality, and a new, unwanted reminder of the horror.

Now, those who had hoped to hear some sort of apology on behalf of the modern Mormon Church from the man who had done more than any of his predecessors to salve the wounds, were left feeling they had come up short. "What we've felt would put this resentment to rest would be an official apology from the church," says Scott Fancher of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas, a group of direct descendants of the victims. "Not an admission of guilt, but an acknowledgement of neglect and of intentional obscuring of the truth."

Others closely involved in Hinckley's participation in the new monument project believe the LDS Church went as far as it's ever going to go in addressing the uncomfortable details of the massacre. "You're not going to get an apology for several reasons, one of which is that as soon as you say you're sorry, here come the wrongful-death lawsuits," says Gene Sessions, president of the Mountain Meadows Association, the organization that partnered with Hinckley on the project. "If President Hinckley ever contemplated he was going to open this can of worms he never would have bothered to do this, because it asks embarrassing questions. It raises the old question of whether Brigham Young ordered the massacre and whether Mormons do terrible things because they think their leaders want them to do terrible things."

Noted Mormon writer Levi Peterson has tried to explain the difficulty that Mormons and their church face in confronting the atrocity of Mountain Meadows. "If good Mormons committed the massacre, if prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a prophet knew about it and later sacrificed John D. Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church seems tainted," he has written.. "Where is the moral superiority of Mormonism, where is the assurance that God has made Mormons his new chosen people?"

Mormons are certainly not alone in trying to square the shedding of innocent blood in the name of God. In the 13th century, the Roman Catholic Church established courts of the Spanish Inquisition, gaining confessions of heresy through torture and punishment by death. In 1692, Puritans in Massachusetts executed 20 people for allegedly practicing witchcraft. But acknowledging any complicity in Mountain Meadows' macabre past is fundamentally problematic for the modern church.
"The massacre has left the Mormon Church on the horns of a dilemma," says Utah historian Will Bagley, author of a forthcoming book on Mountain Meadows.. "It can't acknowledge its historic involvement in a mass murder, and if it can't accept its accountability, it can't repent."

The massacre also shows a darker side to Mormonism's proud pioneer heritage, an element used today to shape the faith's worldwide image. "The problem is that Mormons then were not simply old-fashioned versions of Mormons today," says historian David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom. "Then, they were very zealous believers; it was a faith that put great emphasis on the Old Testament and the Blood of Israel." Brigham Young's theocratic rule of the Utah Territory -- he wore the hats of governor, federal Indian agent and LDS prophet -- was at its zenith in 1857 when the mass murders at Mountain Meadows occurred. Reformation of the LDS Church was in full swing, with members' loyalty challenged by church leaders. Young taught that in a complete theocracy, God required the spilling of a sinner's blood on the ground to properly atone for grievous sins. It was the Mormon doctrine of "blood atonement." The modern church contends blood atonement was mainly a "rhetorical device" used by Young and other leaders to teach Saints the wages of sin. Yet some scholars see its influence even today, pointing to such signs as Utah being the only state left in the nation that allows execution by firing squad. There is widespread disagreement, but some historians have concluded that blood atonement is central to understanding why faithful Mormons would conspire to commit mass murder.

Alternate explanations have included speculation that Indians threatened to prey on local inhabitants if Mormon settlers did not help them raid emigrant wagon trains. There also are the oft-repeated "evil emigrant" stories, accounts that the Arkansas wagon train antagonized Mormon settlers with epithets, poisoned watering holes that resulted in the deaths of Mormon children and Indians, and boastful claims of one contingent called the "Missouri Wildcats" that they were with the Illinois mob that killed LDS founder Joseph Smith.

Retold as fact in many accounts and in the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Mountain Meadows, the veracity of those stories has been called into question since the earliest investigations of the massacre. Historian Juanita Brooks, in her seminal book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, believed the emigrants met their doom in part through their own provocative behavior and because they came from the Arkansas county adjacent to the county where beloved LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt had recently been murdered.

In his forthcoming Blood of the Prophets, Bagley points to new evidence that seems to blunt this one point of Brooks' landmark research. "[Noted historian] Dale Morgan alerted Brooks in 1941 to the likelihood that the emigrant atrocity stories had been 'set afloat by Mormons to further their alibi of the massacre's having been perpetrated by Indians,' " Bagley writes, quoting from Morgan's letter to Brooks. "Even then it was well-established that the Fancher party came from Arkansas, and Morgan had never been satisfied with tales that the company included a large contingent of maniacal Missourians." That a wagon train mainly of women and children would be slaughtered for belligerence and taunting seems too farfetched to many historians today.
"When you have 50 to perhaps more than 70 men participate in an event like this, you can't just say they got upset," says Bigler, a Utah native. "We have to believe they did not want to do what they did any more than you or I would. We have to recognize they thought what they were doing is what authority required of them. The only question to be resolved is did that authority reach all the way to Salt Lake City?"

Fifty years ago, when Brooks broached the question of Young's role and blood atonement in her book, she was labeled an apostate by some and "one of the Lord's lie detectors" by others, such as the late philanthropist O.C. Tanner. Brooks noted her own LDS temple endowment blessing was to "avenge the blood of the prophet," a reference to Smith's 1844 murder. References to vengeance on behalf of slain church leaders eventually were removed from endowment ceremonies. The journals kept by Mormon pioneers, who considered maintaining diaries a religious duty, continue to shed more light on the questions Brooks raised.. Among key developments in the historical record:
-- The Sept. 1, 1857, journal of Young's Indian interpreter, Dimick Huntington, recounts Young's negotiations with the Paiute Indians, who were offered a gift of the emigrant wagon train's cattle. When Paiute leaders noted Young had told them not to steal, Huntington translated Young's reply: "So I have, but now they have come to fight us and you, for when they kill us they will kill you."
-- Young, as superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Utah Territory, ordered the distribution of more than $3,500 in goods to the natives "near Mountain Meadows" less than three weeks after the massacre.
-- The patriarchal blessing given to the commander of the Mormon militia in Beaver, Iron and Washington counties called on Col. William Dame to "act at the head of a portion of thy brethren and of the Lamanites [Indians] in the redemption of Zion and the avenging of the blood of the prophets upon them that dwell on the earth."
There is also additional support for Brooks' original premise: That Young wanted to stage a violent incident to demonstrate to the U.S. government -- which was taking up arms against his theocracy -- that he could persuade the Indians to interrupt travel over the important overland trails, thwarting all emigration. She was the first to note a frequently censored phrase from Young's Aug. 4, 1857, letter to Mormon "Indian missionary" Jacob Hamblin to obtain the tribe's trust, "for they must learn that they have either got to help us or the United States will kill us both." Hinckley has declared, "Let the book of the past be closed" at Mountain Meadows and believes it is pointless to continually speculate on why it happened."None of us can place ourselves in the moccasins of those who lived there at the time," he said in an interview. "The feelings that were aroused, somehow, that I cannot understand. But it occurred. Now, we're trying to do something that we can to honorably and reverently and respectfully remember those who lost their lives there." Sessions, the Weber State University historian who serves as president of the Mountain Meadows Association, says Hinckley's efforts at reconciliation this past summer "may be the most significant event to happen in Mountain Meadows since John D. Lee was executed." Attitudes are changing, he says, pointing to the church's acceptance of interpretive signs at the meadows that better explain who did the killing. As to who ultimately is to blame, perhaps that's not for anyone to judge. "Somebody made a terrible decision that this has got to be done," says Sessions. "I don't justify it in any way. But I do believe it would have taken more guts to stay home in Cedar City on those days in 1857 than it would to go out there to the meadows and take part. "You couldn't stay away. You would have been out there killing people."
----------
Tribune reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack contributed to this story.

New York Times
September 7, 2003, Sunday Book Review

The Great Utah Mystery
By David Haward Bain

AMERICAN MASSACRE
The Tragedy at Mountain
Meadows, September 1857.
By Sally Denton.
Illustrated. 306 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

IN October 1857, California newspapers began to recount terrible rumors, followed by eyewitness reports from newly arrived wagon-train emigrants. While following a lightly trodden path across the southern Utah Territory, in a remote and verdant mountain valley, travelers found large piles of bodies, men separated from women and children, many shot but more bludgeoned and with throats cut, all their possessions from their clothing to their wagons and livestock plundered. Packs of wolves feasted on the remains. The Eastern press soon picked up the story of what would be called the Mountain Meadows Massacre -- some 140 victims, most of them members of the California-bound Baker-Fancher party from Arkansas. Newspapers quickly accused Mormon settlers as the perpetrators. From his heavily guarded keep in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young, the fiery leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, denounced the charges as a ''prolonged howl of base slander'' meant to ''excite to a frenzy a spirit for our extermination.''

As Sally Denton amply shows in ''American Massacre'' -- an excellent introduction to one of the most controversial events in Western American history, one that still stirs strong passions today -- the West already was possessed by frenzy that summer and autumn of 1857. The Mormon enclave in the Salt Lake Valley had grown appreciably since Young had led his faithful there in 1847, after a bitter trek from Council Bluffs, Iowa, which had in turn been preceded by a desperate retreat from the Mormon enclave at Nauvoo, Ill., after furious clashes with non-Mormons in Illinois and Missouri, and the violent death of the Mormons' visionary founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844. In remote Utah the Mormons would be free to practice their religion -- especially its most controversial practice, polygamy. Every pulpit and soapbox in the East had, at one time or another, vibrated against the scourge of Mormonism. Young's haughty revelation-tinged isolationism was creeping close to secessionism by the late 1850's, when Southern states were threatening to leave the Union.

Thousands of emigrants were crossing what was still called the Great American Desert for California, off to homestead or hoping to strike it rich in the goldfields. The passage through the Utah Territory, while geographically and socially unpleasant, did not seem mortally risky. Mormons feared and distrusted outsiders and were inclined to hustle them on, but were usually willing to sell them supplies at inflated prices; in previous years, in quieter political climates, wagon trains like the Baker-Fancher party would have crossed Utah unimpeded.

Not so in 1857. Young was struggling to keep his colonists in line, as many began to chafe under strict theocracy and harsh, isolated living conditions. Defectors were hunted down and killed. Edicts, revelations and political proclamations poured out of Brigham Young, not only threatening Mormon apostates with a revived doctrine called ''blood atonement'' -- purifying sinners and enemies by death -- but menacing non-Mormons, too. Young, also territorial governor, greeted the inauguration of President James Buchanan in March 1857 by denouncing federal authority over the people of Utah. Buchanan, besieged by Southern secessionists, chose to deal with the simpler and more politically popular battle in Utah. He appointed a raft of federal officials, from governor on down, and directed about 2,500 soldiers to escort the new government into Salt Lake City and see that order was restored.

Utah seemed almost red hot, fanned by news that an eminent Mormon ''prophet and seer,'' Parley Pratt, had been killed -- in Arkansas. Pratt had recently taken his 12th wife though she was already married to a non-Mormon. He spirited her to Utah, and then they went south to kidnap her children. In the ensuing chase Pratt was stabbed and shot by the enraged husband. The news of his tawdry death was molded by Young into a tale of religious persecution and murder. Knowing that federal troops approached, Young sent messages to his outposts as far away as California, recalling Mormon colonists for the anticipated war in Utah. During a large convocation of the faithful in the mountains east of Salt Lake City, he declared the independence of the Utah Territory from the United States. ''We are invaded by a hostile force who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction,'' Young proclaimed a short time later. He ordered the faithful not to sell a single kernel of grain to any non-Mormon.

Enter the heedless Baker-Fancher wagon train. It was especially prosperous -- 40 solid, well-equipped wagons, ostentatious carriages, carrying precious household belongings and gold and currency worth at least $100,000, along with herds of horses, dairy cows, beef steers and even exceptional longhorn cattle. Members who had previously crossed Utah were shocked by the hostile reception they received in Salt Lake City. They needed to feed their livestock and resupply for the long trek ahead, but they found no help in the Utah capital.

They headed south and west on Aug. 5, 1857, hoping the Mormons ahead would be more hospitable. They were spurned by one community after another during the next month, with rumors and lies stirring like dust: supposedly they blasphemed by insulting Mormons, especially Young; among the travelers were the killers of Parley Pratt. Several Mormon apostates fleeing the ''Avenging Angels'' seem to have joined the wagon train to get out of Utah, which would have only made it worse for those sheltering them.

The most persistent rumor was that the Arkansans quarreled with local Paiute tribal people and repaid them by poisoning springs and carcasses of oxen, which killed several Indians. This story, attributing the Mountain Meadows Massacre to Indians, though full of holes, has been durable enough to be repeated in recent general histories. Brigham Young himself fed this line out to the world -- the emigrants were killed by Indians -- but Denton demolishes the tale. What is eminently clear from the evidence, she says, is that high officials had already decided that the Arkansans were going to be ''used up'' -- killed.

Having been urged by locals to take the Mountain Meadows route, the Arkansans camped up in the lush, tree-shaded grassland the first week of September. An ambush from the cover of surrounding hills turned into a four-day battle and siege. The travelers, thinking their attackers were Indians and sustaining heavy losses, including small children who were deliberately killed by snipers, held them off but suffered from lack of water. The ambushing force grew over several days until most of the actual Indians present departed with stolen cattle.

Then, on Sept. 11, a white man appeared under a flag of truce, telling the wagon train party he was the local Indian agent, and brokered an agreement in which the wagon train gave up its weapons to be escorted to safety. The man was John D. Lee, a member of the secret brute squad, the Danites, and an adopted son of Brigham Young. With their weapons gone, assuming that they were only being robbed, the Arkansans were marched and separated into groups, and, one by one, shot and clubbed down, their throats cut. The apostates with them were summarily ''blood atoned.''

The only eyewitness accounts of Mountain Meadows come from some of the murderers and from survivors -- all of whom were under the age of 7 at the time, deliberately spared by the assailants as having ''innocent blood.'' ''My father was killed by Indians,'' the son of the wagonmaster, Alexander Fancher, would say two years later. ''When they washed their faces they were white men.'' Joining Lee in the ambush and slaughter were at least 100 Mormon men -- civilians, military men and local religious leaders.

Not surprisingly, justice was elusive in Utah. All the Mountain Meadows killers swore a solemn oath of secrecy. The story told in the southern towns as well as in Salt Lake City blamed the Paiutes and the victims. The church appointed Lee to write the official account. In autumn 1857, as the political situation heated up (a Mormon paramilitary unit raided and burned Fort Bridger and the approaching federal army's winter supplies), Mormons in the southern communities began openly sporting clothing, jewelry and other possessions of the massacre victims, appropriating their wagons and carriages and corralling their branded livestock. Lee actually submitted a bill to the federal government for providing cattle and supplies to local Indians, all of it plunder.

With the federals wintering over (and starving) near the Bridger ruins, a desperate President Buchanan agreed in early 1858 that in return for restored peace and order, he would give amnesty for all federal offenses from treason to murder. The Mountain Meadows orphans were rounded up from the homes of their parents' murderers and returned to Arkansas. A promised Mormon internal investigation predictably blamed the Indians. When a newly appointed federal judge arrived in Utah, though, he easily found enough evidence to charge church members with mass murder and robbery, despite flagrant local efforts to derail his work. He issued bench warrants for 38 people, most notably Lee. A trial -- and inclinations to arrest Young as an accessory before the fact -- hit a stone wall. Buchanan, politically besieged by the brewing Civil War, quashed the judge's campaign and ordered Army officers to withdraw. The judge was later exiled to northern Nevada.

The Utah cover-up continued, as Denton writes, until the appearance of a series of anonymous open letters to Young in Utah newspapers. They were written with intimate knowledge of the massacre and cover-up, and as indignation again mounted, Young discreetly sent Lee to hide out in Arizona. Then, finally, one of the murderers stepped forward -- a Mormon bishop, Philip Klingensmith. His testimony hit the Eastern newspapers in September 1872, and in 1874 an outraged Congress reasserted federal jurisdiction over crimes in Utah. A grand jury indicted nine people, including Lee.

He would be the only man tried. Lee steadfastly maintained his innocence and also, strongly, Young's. A monthlong trial resulted in a hung jury, to general local celebration, but a second trial was quickly ordered. Before that occurred in September 1876, a new federal attorney recognized that he would never obtain a conviction without Young's aid. He struck a deal: in return for receiving witnesses and documents to guarantee Lee's conviction, the prosecutor would drop all efforts against other Mormon conspirators and make it plain that Young and the church were not on trial.

Finally Lee realized that he was being made the scapegoat when Mormon Church attorneys and resources were pulled out before the second trial began. His end came speedily. The trial (with an all-Mormon jury) began on Sept. 11, 1876, the 19th anniversary of the massacre, and made it seem that Lee was the only murderer present at Mountain Meadows. Mixing true testimony with false, a parade of witnesses wove a noose around Lee's neck; he collapsed at one point and seemed resigned to death. His lawyers called no witnesses. On Sept. 20 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder in less than four hours. On Oct. 10 he was sentenced to die, but appeals delayed execution until the following spring. He used the interim to write four contradictory ''confessions,'' which continued to blame the Paiutes and exonerate his beloved church and its fearless leader, and led future historians astray for generations. Privately, he railed against Young for the betrayal, but Lee went to his death by firing squad on March 23, 1877.

Young died five months later, and the church began its long growth away from the radical tenets that had made it so hated and feared in the 19th century. But it doggedly maintained into the 1990's that Paiutes were to blame for Mountain Meadows.

''American Massacre'' moves briskly, although in its first third it is marred by clumsy quotations. The book is strongly dependent on secondary sources, most significantly Will Bagley's ''Blood of the Prophets.'' (The pioneer Utah historian Juanita Brooks published the first important study of the incident, ''The Mountain Meadows Massacre,'' in 1962.) Bagley may be the superior scholar -- Denton's book is about half the length, with minimal endnotes -- but as writers they are evenly matched; when Denton, a reporter for newspapers and television, hits her stride the subject takes over and her book becomes gripping. She also adds valuable material to the historical record; she has found diary extracts apparently overlooked by the others, and has interviewed a number of descendants whose oral family traditions shed new light on the subject.

Mountain Meadows seems destined to live on. When Bagley's book was published in September 2002, the Mormon Church was quick to complain about jumping to conclusions with circumstantial evidence. Ronald W. Walker, a history professor at Brigham Young University, has argued that there was no persuasive evidence that Brigham Young orchestrated Mountain Meadows or that John D. Lee was thrown to the wolves as a part of a deal for Utah statehood. Walker has said that the church is cooperating fully with him and two co-authors, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, in an ''official'' Mountain Meadows history, to be published in 2004, that would ''shed light and understanding on the event.''

David Haward Bain is the author of ''Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad.''

Published: 09 - 07 - 2003 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 14

Dereret News, January 9, 2003

Mountain Meadows debate still smolders

Oral histories of descendants rife with controversy

By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret News religion editor

      The details on two separate historical markers erected years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre reflect the continuing tensions and questions that surround the slaughter of Arkansas emigrants to this day.
      The Arkansas plaque marks the place where 150 residents of that state embarked on a wagon train cattle drive to California, only to be "massacred by Mormons disguised as Indians," according to the text, which also notes that 17 small children survived the September 1857 attack in southern Utah.
      An old Utah marker, erected in 1934 near Mountain Meadows, noted the wagon train members were murdered by "Indians and whites."
      While none of the perpetrators or victims survive, the stories told by descendants of each group involved continue to shape their collective identities and affect the relationships between them to this day.
      That is according to Shannon Novak, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Utah, who examined the skeletal remains of the massacre victims and is now conducting a two-year study of the oral and written traditions about the events.
      During a presentation Wednesday at the U., Novak outlined the widely differing accounts of the murders among the descendants of Latter-day Saints and American Indians who participated in or witnessed the massacre, as well as those of the wagon train's two surviving family clans, dubbed the "black Fanchers" and the "red Fanchers" to distinguish the descendants of wagon train leader Alexander Fancher through his two surviving children.
      Historians associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have focused on the "special circumstances" prevalent in Utah at the time, she said. The U.S. Army's presence in the Utah Territory (then a theocracy led by Brigham Young), rumors about the Fancher party's connection to the Haun's Mill massacre of Latter-day Saints years earlier, and an alleged planned attack on the Fancher party by Indians in southern Utah all figure large into official versions of the events, Novak said.
      "Whether this interpretation is supported by historical evidence is a matter of scholarly debate," she said, and several historians have written detailed treatises examining the culpability of various parties. Some believed from the outset that the massacre was orchestrated by top LDS leaders.
      Though there is no definitive history of the event, John D. Lee was eventually convicted and executed for the murders. A leading member of the LDS Church in southern Utah at the time, Lee's involvement led Novak to examine the effect on his descendants who live there, as well as those of Samuel Knight, another Latter-day Saint who participated.
      She has also talked with members of two Paiute Indian bands that were living in the area at the time as well as descendants of the Fancher party in Arkansas.
      Many of Lee's descendants are torn between their loyalty to the LDS Church and their affection for a common ancestor that some believe paid "the ultimate price to protect Brigham Young and the church." Some even "hint that Lee was a Christ-like figure who died so the church could be saved," and believe they continue to bear a disproportionate share of the burden for the events.
      Southern Paiutes had become dependent on LDS settlers for their livelihood in the years before the massacre, she said, and became the LDS scapegoat among southern Utah church leaders at the time. Their version of events was either ignored or discounted historically, and it is only in the past few years that researchers have begun to probe their oral histories.
      The accounts agree the Paiutes only heard and watched from a distance as the massacre unfolded, though they knew they would be blamed for the murders, she said. While there is no evidence that any of the Paiutes interviewed actually descend from those who knew about the massacre, there is now a tension between many tribe members' current loyalty to the LDS Church and to their ethnic forbears.
      Accounts by descendants of the survivors tend to focus on desecration of the bodies and the fate of the 17 small children who were spared, Novak said. Dialogue has been spurred in recent years by the Internet, which has afforded the Fanchers a medium to publish their versions of the events, some of which differ widely from LDS historical accounts.
      While some versions are "surprisingly sympathetic" toward Latter-day Saints, noting their long history of persecution, others emphasize a lasting, "bitter hatred of everything that smacked of Mormonism," she said. Yet having Latter-day Saints as common enemies has given many Fanchers a cause to unite, despite deep divisiveness and even bloodshed among members of the descending family groups.
      As a result, Novak sees "no end to the social and political fallout." Her study of the skeletal remains of the victims, along with information gleaned from descendants, will appear in a future book to be published by the University of Utah Press. The effort is one of several undertaken in recent years involving the massacre. Author Wil Bagley published his findings last year, and historians for the LDS Church are now at work on a book they say will contain new sources of information previously unavailable.
     

February 21, 2004

University publishers find LDS history sells

By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune

    In its heyday, the University of Utah Press was the premier publisher of Mormon scholarship, producing groundbreaking works such as Sterling McMurrin's Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion, Leonard Arrington's Great Basin Kingdom and biographies of colorful Mormon figures such as gunslinger Orrin Porter Rockwell and renegade historian Juanita Brooks.
    Sometime in the 1980s, though, the U. began turning to nature writing and archaeology. By 1994, it canceled the Mormon studies series altogether.
    "We didn't consciously say, 'We will never publish Mormon history again,' " says Jeff Grathwohl, current director of U. of U. Press. "But we didn't want to be known as the Mormon publisher, either."
    Meanwhile, Elizabeth Dulany of University of Illinois Press spied a chance to grab the LDS history niche. Around 1980, she began hanging out at Mormon History Association meetings, schmoozing authors and scouting for manuscripts.
    Mormonism was "virtually ignored by non-Mormon publishers. Historians skirted the issue because of the religious factor," Dulany explained. "My goal was to mainstream it into the rest of Western history and American history."
    Her tactics worked. In the past 20 years, Illinois Press has led the way in scholarly publishing on Mormon subjects, cranking out scores of volumes, many of them award winners. Likewise, Utah State University Press has benefited from the genre. It has about three dozen Mormon history titles in its collection and has no plans to slack off. The works are rigorously scrutinized before publication to ensure they are more scholarly than faith-promoting, USU Press director Michael Spooner says.
    "This is not BYU North," he says.
    Now U. of U. Press wants back into the competition. Sales of environmental tomes seem to have dried up just as books such as Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and two explorations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre enjoyed breathtaking success.
    Last November, U. of U. Press hired acquisition editor Peter DeLafosse and told him to focus on Utah, the Mormons and the West. He has found two new projects: a biography of former LDS President David O. McKay and a look at recent forensic work on the remains of Mountain Meadows victims.
    Says Grathwohl: "We are well-aware there's a market to be tapped."
   

Mountain Meadows massacre analysis ends with an accusation

By Martin Naparsteck
The Salt Lake Tribune

   American Massacre
   By Sally Denton
   Knopf, $26.95
   
    Brigham Young, as portrayed in Sally Denton's American Massacre, is a murderer and liar and commits treason. Her case is more strongly stated than in the two best previous books on the same subject, Juanita Brooks' 1950 Mountain Meadows Massacre and Will Bagley's 2002 Blood of the Prophets.
    For those who view Young as a great man who did little or no wrong, her tone will be blasphemous; for those who view him as a self-centered dictator or worse, her argument will seem highly credible.

When the 1857 massacre occurred at Mountain Meadows in southwestern Utah -- the cold-blooded murder of at least 120 men, women and children on a wagon train headed from Arkansas to California -- LDS Church officials claimed Paiute Indians were responsible. Now, almost a century and a half after the event, nearly all reputable historians believe the murderers were white Mormons. Up to 50 Mormons took part in the murders, but only John D. Lee was punished; he was executed at the meadows 20 years later. Although he was clearly guilty, history also judged Lee to be a sacrificial lamb whose death by firing squad ended two decades of investigation into just how high in the church culpability reached.
    There is disagreement among historians about exactly how many people were killed, how many Mormons took part in the murders, how much loot was taken, how many small children survived. But one overarching question dominates historical inquiries into the massacre: Did Brigham Young order the killings?
    Gordon B. Hinckley, current president of the church, speaking at 1999 ceremonies marking the placement of a monument that for the first time acknowledged Mormons were responsible, said: "That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment on the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day."
    Brooks, a devout member of the church, showed great courage in publishing her book at a time when she risked excommunication and social ostracism. But she never seriously addressed the question of Young's involvement. She merely asked the question and, in essence, answered that there wasn't enough evidence on either side to answer it. Bagley (who writes a history column for The Salt Lake Tribune) used numerous sources not available to Brooks and concluded, essentially, that nothing of significance could occur in Utah in 1857 without Young's knowledge and approval. He stopped about a quarter-inch short of saying Young ordered the killings.
    Denton comes even closer to saying Young knew in advance and probably ordered the killings. She gets as close to making that charge as a serious scholar can (and this book, regardless of whether you agree with the author's conclusions, is indeed serious scholarship) without a signed confession.
    She repeatedly calls Young a dictator, depicts him as mean-spirited and claims he lied when he denied that Mormons perpetrated the killings.
    The massacre occurred after President James Buchanan ordered the U.S. Army to remove Young from office. Young had been appointed governor of Utah Territory by President Millard Fillmore and ran Utah more as a theocracy than as a territory of the United States. Buchanan intended to establish U.S. authority over Utah. Young responded by putting Utah under martial law, ordering the destruction of army supplies and preparing to go to war with the United States. Under any reasonable definition of the term, he was guilty of treason.
    Buchanan avoided a shooting war between Utah and the United States partly by promising Young and other Mormon leaders a pardon from charges of treason. The war was averted, but the massacre had taken place.
    Brooks wrote near the end of her book, "While Brigham Young . . . did not specifically order the massacre, [he] did preach sermons and set up social conditions which made it possible."
    Bagley wrote, "As long as modern [church leaders] deny that the LDS church had 'any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day,' they can never come to terms with the truth."
    Denton writes, "Within the context of the era and the history of Brigham Young's complete authoritarian control over his domain and his followers, it is inconceivable that a crime of this magnitude could have occurred without direct orders from him."
    There is a progression worthy of note, from Brooks' courage in defying her church to the thorough and convincing scholarship of Bagley to the daring accusation of Denton. It is like three trial lawyers working together: Brooks with the opening argument, Bagley presenting endless details to the jury and Denton with the summation.
    In Lee's first trial, the jury was hung because a majority of the jurors were Mormon and perhaps acting on orders from church leaders. In the second trial, church leaders, seeking to end the country's insistence that someone be punished, may have instructed the jurors to find him guilty.
    The jury of readers of history must now decide whom they take orders from: a church leadership embarrassed by its past or their own consciences.
   -----
    Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake Tribune.

---

City goes a head with statue of Mountain Meadows Massacre figure

Thursday, March 25, 2004 - 12:00 AM
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Utah -- City officials are determined to honor pioneer John D. Lee with a statue despite his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 120 men, women and children.

The statue will be placed by those of pioneers Samuel J. Adair, Robert D. Covington, John P.Chidester and Peter Nielson in the horseshoe-shaped memorial in front of the Washington City Museum. It will be dedicated May 7.

Lee's statue "is a part of the pioneer plaza and is not the focal point," said Mayor Terrill Clove. "He helped establish the city. All (these settlers) left a significant story."

Kent Bylund of the Mountain Meadows Association said he could not believe the city was going to go ahead with the statue, which he said would be an insult to the victims' descendants and negative for Lee's family.

"It would be in bad taste ... (and) I feel bad for John D. Lee and his family," Bylund said.

Washington resident Bill Loader wrote the council that while Lee might have made contributions, his act at Mountain Meadows outweighed others.

"Yes, I can forgive him and acknowledge his contributions as a pioneer. The problem I have is rubbing the descendants' noses in this infamous affair by erecting a statue of a man whose name symbolizes the act that caused their forebearers' death," Loader said.
   

---

Southern Utah city to raise statue of John D. Lee
March 26, 2004

The eyes of a statue of pioneer John D. Lee will stare out over Washington City beginning May 7. (Jerry Anderson)

By Mark Havnes
The Salt Lake Tribune

    WASHINGTON CITY -- John D. Lee -- early Utah developer, farmer, explorer, diplomat, adopted son of Brigham Young and executed killer -- is about to be elevated to a pedestal overlooking this expanding southwestern city.
    A life-size bronze statue of Lee has been standing in the corner of an art studio for more than a year, waiting to see if it will join the statues of four other Mormon pioneers who started Washington City, two miles north of St. George.
    The problem was, should the city honor a man who, in September 1857, took part in the massacre at Mountain Meadows of 120 Arkansas settlers on their way to California?
    "The time has come to do it," said Mayor Terrill Clove on Thursday. "Its risky, but we're going to go for it."
    The statue will join those of Samuel Adair, Robert Covington, John Chidester and Peter Neilson who, along with Lee, helped carve this community out of the red desert landscape on orders of LDS Church President Young.
    The unveiling will be May 7 during Cotton Days in front of the Old Rock School, which contains the city museum.
    Many here feel Lee was sacrificed to appease authorities and that his life as a settler of the community went beyond his infamous reputation as the only man tried and convicted of in the massacre. He was executed by a firing squad in 1877.
    "Lee bought property here to grow cotton, built a mill and was involved as a liaison with the Indians," said Clove.

    The statue was commissioned in 2002 with the other figures, but its installation has been delayed while the town waited for an opinion from leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
    Clove said a letter from the office of LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinkley said the church had no opinion on the matter, which alleviated a lot of pressure from city officials.
    "I don't like controversy," he said.
    "And if the church has hot issues with the statue, we probably won't put it up,"
    Since announcing the decision in this month's city newsletter, a few calls of outrage and some of encouragement have come into city offices.
   Scott Fancher, treasurer of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Memorial Foundation in Arkansas, said on Thursday, "Our foundation believes Lee was offered up as a scapegoat and received more blame than he deserves. He didn't act without orders."
    Harold Cahoon, historian and treasurer of the Washington City Historical Society, said the mystery surrounding who ordered the massacre will keep interest in it alive, even if many in southern Utah wish all memory of the incident would just disappear.
    "You have to decide and make your own assessment," said Cahoon of Lee. "He just did what he was told to do."You have to decide and make your own assessment. He just did what he was told to do.
   

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